o help you out, do but consider that if EXTENSION be once
acknowledged to have no existence without the mind, the same must
necessarily be granted of motion, solidity, and gravity; since they all
evidently suppose extension. It is therefore superfluous to inquire
particularly concerning each of them. In denying extension, you have
denied them all to have any real existence.

HYL. I wonder, Philonous, if what you say be true, why those
philosophers who deny the Secondary Qualities any real existence should
yet attribute it to the Primary. If there is no difference between them,
how can this be accounted for?

PHIL. It is not my business to account for every opinion of the
philosophers. But, among other reasons which may be assigned for this, it
seems probable that pleasure and pain being rather annexed to the former
than the latter may be one. Heat and cold, tastes and smells, have
something more vividly pleasing or disagreeable than the ideas of
extension, figure, and motion affect us with. And, it being too visibly
absurd to hold that pain or pleasure can be in an unperceiving substance,
men are more easily weaned from believing the external existence of the
Secondary than the Primary Qualities. You will be satisfied there is
something in this, if you recollect the difference you made between an
intense and more moderate degree of heat; allowing the one a real
existence, while you denied it to the other. But, after all, there is no
rational ground for that distinction; for, surely an indifferent
sensation is as truly a SENSATION as one more pleasing or
painful; and consequently should not any more than they be supposed to
exist in an unthinking subject.

HYL. It is just come into my head, Philonous, that I have somewhere
heard of a distinction between absolute and sensible extension. Now,
though it be acknowledged that GREAT and SMALL, consisting merely in
the relation which other extended beings have to the parts of our own
bodies, do not really inhere in the substances themselves; yet nothing
obliges us to hold the same with regard to ABSOLUTE EXTENSION, which is
something abstracted from GREAT and SMALL, from this or that
particular magnitude or figure. So likewise as to motion; SWIFT and
SLOW are altogether relative to the succession of ideas in our own
minds. But, it doth not follow, because those modifications of motion
exist not without the mind, that therefore absolute motion abstracted
from them doth not