ife,
have no reason to be solicitous about any other unknown beings. A piece
of sensible bread, for instance, would stay my stomach better than ten
thousand times as much of that insensible, unintelligible, real bread you
speak of. It is likewise my opinion that colours and other sensible
qualities are on the objects. I cannot for my life help thinking
that snow is white, and fire hot. You indeed, who by SNOW and fire mean
certain external, unperceived, unperceiving substances, are in the right
to deny whiteness or heat to be affections inherent in THEM. But I, who
understand by those words the things I see and feel, am obliged to think
like other folks. And, as I am no sceptic with regard to the nature of
things, so neither am I as to their existence. That a thing should be
really perceived by my senses, and at the same time not really exist, is
to me a plain contradiction; since I cannot prescind or abstract, even in
thought, the existence of a sensible thing from its being perceived.
Wood, stones, fire, water, flesh, iron, and the like things, which I name
and discourse of, are things that I know. And I should not have known
them but that I perceived them by my senses; and things perceived by the
senses are immediately perceived; and things immediately perceived are
ideas; and ideas cannot exist without the mind; their existence therefore
consists in being perceived; when, therefore, they are actually perceived
there can be no doubt of their existence. Away then with all that
scepticism, all those ridiculous philosophical doubts. What a jest is it
for a philosopher to question the existence of sensible things, till he
hath it proved to him from the veracity of God; or to pretend our
knowledge in this point falls short of intuition or demonstration! I
might as well doubt of my own being, as of the being of those things I
actually see and feel.

HYL. Not so fast, Philonous: you say you cannot conceive how sensible
things should exist without the mind. Do you not?

PHIL. I do.

HYL. Supposing you were annihilated, cannot you conceive it possible
that things perceivable by sense may still exist?

PHIL. _I_ can; but then it must be in another mind. When I deny
sensible things an existence out of the mind, I do not mean my mind in
particular, but all minds. Now, it is plain they have an existence
exterior to my mind; since I find them by experience to be independent of
it. There is therefore some other Mind wherein