(3) It may be suggested, next, that these "sources," instead of being
something spiritual in their nature or something of a nature utterly
unknown, consist simply of sensibles, of a kind which I have previously
tried to define; namely of all those sensibles, which anybody _would,_
under the actual physical conditions, experience in _sensations proper_
of which the half-crown and the florin were the source, _if_ their
bodies were in any of the positions relatively to those coins, in which
they would get sensations from them at all. We saw before that it seems
_possible_ that all these sensibles do really exist at times when they
are not experienced, and that some people, at all events, seem to have
a strong propensity to believe that they do. And in favour of the view
that some such huge collection of sensibles _is_ the upper side of the
half-crown, is the fact that we do seem to have a strong propensity
to believe that any particular sensible, which we directly apprehend
in looking at the upper side of the half-crown, and of our direct
apprehension of which the upper side is the source, is _in the place_
in which the upper side is. And that _some_ sense might be given to
the expression "in the same place as," in which it could be true that
sensibles of all sorts of different shapes and sizes, and of all sorts
of different colours, were in the same place at the same time, seems to
me to be possible. But the objection to this view seems to me to be the
same as to the last; namely that if the upper side of the half-crown
were identical with such a collection of sensibles, then the only sense
in which it could be said to be "circular," or bigger than that of the
florin, would certainly be very Pickwickian, though not the same as on
that view.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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