se in material
motions pressing on our organs, producing motion in them, and so
affecting the mind; that our sensations do not correspond with outward
qualities; that sound and noise belong to the bell and the air, and not
to the mind, and, like colour, are only agitations occasioned by the
object in the brain; that imagination is a conception gradually dying
away after the act of sense, and is nothing more than a decaying
sensation; that memory is the vestige of former impressions, enduring
for a time; that forgetfulness is the obliteration of such vestiges;
that the succession of thought is not indifferent, at random, or
voluntary, but that thought follows thought in a determinate and
predestined sequence; that whatever we imagine is finite, and hence we
cannot conceive of the infinite, nor think of anything not subject to
sense? Shall we say with Locke that there are two sources of our ideas,
sensation and reflection; that the mind cannot know things directly, but
only through ideas? Shall we suggest with Leibnitz that reflection is
nothing more than attention to what is passing in the mind, and that
between the mind and the body there is a sympathetic synchronism? With
Berkeley shall we assert that there is no other reason for inferring the
existence of matter itself than the necessity of having some synthesis
for its attributes; that the objects of knowledge are ideas and nothing
else; and that the mind is active in sensation? Shall we listen to the
demonstration of Hume, that, if matter be an unreal fiction, the mind
is not less so, since it is no more than a succession of impressions and
ideas; that our belief in causation is only the consequence of habit;
and that we have better proof that night is the cause of day, than of
thousands of other cases in which we persuade ourselves that we know the
right relation of cause and effect; that from habit alone we believe the
future will resemble the past? Shall we infer with Condillac that memory
is only transformed sensation, and comparison double attention; that
every idea for which we cannot find an exterior object is destitute of
significance; that our innate ideas come by development, and that
reasoning and running are learned together. With Kant shall we conclude
that there is but one source of knowledge, the union of the object and
the subject--but two elements thereof, space and time; and that they are
forms of sensibility, space being a form of internal sensibili