Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics: With Some of Their ApplicationsThornton, William Thomas
Philosophy
Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics: With Some of Their Applications
Thornton, William Thomas
Metaphysics; Utilitarianism
perceive to be large, round, hard, and either rotating or motionless,
has no more perception of its own extension, figure, solidity, motion,
or rest than a snowball has of its colour or temperature. But all this,
though perfectly true, has nothing to do with the question, which is not
_what_ qualities of matter are, but _where_ they are, and whether they
can exist anywhere but in mind; and this question, I submit, is
distinctly begged by those who assume, as is done throughout the
reasoning under examination, that our _sensations_ with regard to
material objects, and the _qualities_ of those objects, are synonymous
and convertible terms. Incontestably, sensations are affections of the
mind which neither have nor can have any existence outside the mind. If,
then, the qualities of objects are identical with the sensations which
arise in the mind concerning those objects, why, of course, the
qualities likewise can exist nowhere but in the mind. On narrowly
scrutinising, however, the supposed identity, we shall find that it
involves somewhat reckless confusion of diametrical opposites. When I
look at or smell a rose, or eat a beefsteak, or listen to a piano, the
sensations which thereupon arise within me, whether immediately or
subsequently, either are the results of my seeing, smelling, eating, or
hearing, or they are not. To say that they are not is equivalent to
saying that an object need not be within reach of the perceptive
faculties in order to be perceived; that I may see or smell a rose,
though there be no rose to be seen or smelt; may dine sumptuously off
empty dishes, and be raised to the seventh heaven of delight by the
audible strains of a music which is not being executed. _Fortunati
nimium_--only too lucky would mankind be, did this turn out to be a
correct theory, affording as it would a solution of every social
problem, and serving as a panacea for every social evil. Psychology
would then be the only science worth attention, for of whatever things
proficiency in that branch of study had qualified any one to form mental
images, of those same things would he simultaneously become possessor in
full property. Whoever had succeeded in training himself to imagine
vigorously might at once have, do, or be whatever it pleased him to
imagine, becoming _ipso facto_, as the Stoics used to say an acquirer of
virtue does, 'rich, beautiful, a king.' Woe betide any one, however,
who, as long as the cosmical constitution remains what it is, shall
attempt to put the theory into practice, and desisting from all those
animal functions, involving intercourse with a real or imaginary
external world, which are vulgarly supposed essential to animal
existence, shall obstinately restrict himself to the sensations which he
believes the mind to be, without any such intercourse, capable of
creating for the body's sustenance and delectation. The physical
extinction inevitably consequent on such devotion to principle would
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