Mysticism and Logic and Other EssaysRussell, Bertrand
Philosophy
Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays
Russell, Bertrand
Mathematics; Philosophy; Science
being painful, or we may mean the quality of painfulness itself. When
a man says he has a pain in his great toe, what he means is that he
has a sensation associated with his great toe and having the quality
of painfulness. The sensation itself, like every sensation, consists
in experiencing a sensible object, and the experiencing has that
quality of painfulness which only mental occurrences can have, but
which may belong to thoughts or desires, as well as to sensations. But
in common language we speak of the sensible object experienced in a
painful sensation as a pain, and it is this way of speaking which
causes the confusion upon which the plausibility of Berkeley's
argument depends. It would be absurd to attribute the quality of
painfulness to anything non-mental, and hence it comes to be thought
that what we call a pain in the toe must be mental. In fact, however,
it is not the sensible object in such a case which is painful, but the
sensation, that is to say, the experience of the sensible object. As
the heat which we experience from the fire grows greater, the
experience passes gradually from being pleasant to being painful, but
neither the pleasure nor the pain is a quality of the object
experienced as opposed to the experience, and it is therefore a
fallacy to argue that this object must be mental on the ground that
painfulness can only be attributed to what is mental.
If, then, when we say that something is in the mind we mean that it
has a certain recognisable intrinsic characteristic such as belongs to
thoughts and desires, it must be maintained on grounds of immediate
inspection that objects of sense are not in any mind.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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