tutt de
Tracy. Hamilton accuses Brown of plagiarism.[484] Whether his
accusation be justifiable or not, it is certainly true that Brown had
in some way reached the same principles which had been already set
forth by a leading 'ideologist.' Brown, that is, though the official
exponent of the Scottish philosophy, was in this philosophical tenet
at one with the school which they regarded as materialistic or
sceptical. The path by which he reaches his conclusions is also
characteristic.

Brown has reversed the interpretation of Reid's _experimentum crucis_.
I will give up my case, says Reid, if you can make the external world
out of sensations. That, replies Brown, is precisely what we can do.
How from sensations do we get what Berkeley called 'outness'? We get
it, says Brown, from the sense of resistance or 'impeded effort.' That
reveals to us the fact that there is something independent of
ourselves, and the belief in such a something is precisely what we
mean, and all that we mean, by the belief in an external world.
Consistently with this, Brown rejects Reid's distinction between the
primary and secondary qualities. The distinction corresponds no doubt
to some real differences, but there is no difference of the kind
suggested by Reid. 'All [the qualities] are relative and equally
relative--our perception of extension and resistance as much as our
perception of fragrance and bitterness.'[485] We ascribe the
sensations to 'external objects,' but the objects are only known by
the 'medium' of our sensations. In other words, the whole world may be
regarded as a set of sensations, whether of sight, smell, touch, or
resistance to muscular movement, accompanied by the belief that they
are caused by something not ourselves, and of which something we can
only say that it is not ourselves.

Once more, the analysis of the process by which the belief is
generated is significant. From resistance, or the sensation produced
when something 'resists our attempts to grasp it,' we get the
'outness.' Then perception is 'nothing more than the association of
this complex notion with our other sensations--the notion of something
extended and resisting, suggested by these sensations, when the
suggestions themselves have previously arisen, and suggested in the
same manner and on the same principle as any other associate feeling
suggests any other associate feeling.'[486] The odour or colour of a
rose recalls the sensation of touching and of r