e bring reasons
against it: though another would think it reasonable the proof should lie
on him who holds the affirmative. And, after all, this very point which
you are now resolved to maintain, without any reason, is in effect what
you have more than once during this discourse seen good reason to give
up. But, to pass over all this; if I understand you rightly, you say our
ideas do not exist without the mind, but that they are copies, images, or
representations, of certain originals that do?

HYL. You take me right.

PHIL. They are then like external things?

HYL. They are.

PHIL. Have those things a stable and permanent nature, independent of
our senses; or are they in a perpetual change, upon our producing any
motions in our bodies--suspending, exerting, or altering, our faculties
or organs of sense?

HYL. Real things, it is plain, have a fixed and real nature, which
remains the same notwithstanding any change in our senses, or in the
posture and motion of our bodies; which indeed may affect the ideas in
our minds, but it were absurd to think they had the same effect on things
existing without the mind.

PHIL. How then is it possible that things perpetually fleeting and
variable as our ideas should be copies or images of anything fixed and
constant? Or, in other words, since all sensible qualities, as
size, figure, colour, &c., that is, our ideas, are continually changing,
upon every alteration in the distance, medium, or instruments of
sensation; how can any determinate material objects be properly
represented or painted forth by several distinct things, each of which is
so different from and unlike the rest? Or, if you say it resembles some
one only of our ideas, how shall we be able to distinguish the true copy
from all the false ones?

HYL. I profess, Philonous, I am at a loss. I know not what to say to
this.

PHIL. But neither is this all. Which are material objects in
themselves--perceptible or imperceptible?

HYL. Properly and immediately nothing can be perceived but ideas. All
material things, therefore, are in themselves insensible, and to be
perceived only by our ideas.

PHIL. Ideas then are sensible, and their archetypes or originals
insensible?

HYL. Right.

PHIL. But how can that which is sensible be like that which is
insensible? Can a real thing, in itself INVISIBLE, be like a COLOUR;
or a real thing, which is not AUDIBLE, be like a SOUND? In a word,
can anything be like