offered in this kindly fashion, may bring out an answer, but what real
worth can such an answer have?
One bright day I came home from court and saw a man step out of a
cornfield, remain a few instants in my field of vision, and then
disappear. I felt at once that the man had done something suspicious,
and immediately asked myself how he looked. I found I knew nothing of
his clothes, his dress, his beard, his size, in a word, nothing at all
about him. But how I would have punished a witness who should have known
just as little. We shall have, in the course of this examination,
frequently to mention the fact that we do not see an event in spite of
its being in the field of perception. I want at this point merely to
call attention to a single well-known case, recorded by Hofmann.[195] At
a trial a circumstantial and accurate attempt was made to discover
whether it was a significant alteration to bite a man’s ear off. The
court, the physician, the witnesses, etc., dealt with the question of
altering, until finally the wounded man himself showed what was meant,
because his other ear had been bitten off many years before,--but then
nobody had noticed that mutilated ear.
In order to know what another person has seen and apprehended we must
first of all know how he thinks, and that is impossible. We frequently
say of another that he must have thought this or that, or have hit upon
such and such ideas, but what the events in another brain may be we can
never observe. As Bois-Reymond says somewhere: “If Laplace’s ghost could
build a homunculus according to the Leibnitzian theory, atom by atom and
molecule by molecule, he might succeed in making it think, but not in
knowing how it thinks.” But if we know, at least approximately, the kind
of mental process of a person who is as close as possible to us in sex,
age, culture, position, experience, etc., we lose this knowledge with
every step that leads to differences. We know well what great influence
is exercised by the multiplicity of talents, superpositions, knowledge,
and apprehensions. When we consider the qualities of things, we
discover that we never apprehend them abstractly, but always concretely.
We do not see color but the colored object; we do not see warmth, but
something warm; not hardness, but something hard. The concept warm, as
such, can not be thought of by anybody, and at the mention of the word
each will think of some particular warm object; one, of his oven at
home; another, of a warm day in Italy; another of a piece of hot iron
which burnt him once. Then the individual does not pay constant court to
the same object. To-day he has in mind this concrete thing, to-morrow,
he uses different names and makes different associations. But every
concrete object I think of has considerable effect on the new
apprehension; and my auditor does not know, perhaps even I myself do
not, what concrete object I have already in mind. And although Berkeley
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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