The collected works of William Hazlitt, Vol. 11 (of 12)Hazlitt, William
Philosophy
The collected works of William Hazlitt, Vol. 11 (of 12)
Hazlitt, William
English essays -- 19th century
‘10. They who assert that figure, motion, and the rest of the primary or
original qualities do exist without the mind, in unthinking substances,
do at the same time acknowledge that colours, sounds, heat, cold, &c. do
not, which they tell us are sensations existing in the mind alone, that
depend on, and are occasioned by the different size, texture, motion,
&c. of the minute particles of matter. This they take for an undoubted
truth, which they can demonstrate beyond all exception. Now if it be
certain that those original qualities are inseparably united with the
other sensible qualities, and not, even in thought, capable of being
abstracted from them, it plainly follows that they exist only in the
mind. But I desire any one to reflect and try whether he can, by any
abstraction of thought, conceive the extension and motion of a body,
without all other sensible qualities. For my own part, I see evidently
that it is not in my power to form an idea of a body extended and
moving, but I must withal give it some colour or other sensible quality,
which is acknowledged to exist only in the mind. In short, extension,
figure, and motion, abstracted from all other qualities, are
inconceivable. Where, therefore, the other sensible qualities are, there
must these be also, _i.e._ in the mind, and no where else.
‘11. Again, _great_ and _small_, _swift_ and _slow_, are allowed to
exist nowhere without the mind, being entirely relative, and changing as
the frame or position of the organs of sense varies. The extension,
therefore, which exists without the mind, is neither great nor small,
the motion neither swift nor slow; that is, they are nothing at all.
But, say you, they are extension in general and motion in general. Thus
we see how much the tenet of extended, moveable substances, existing
without the mind, depends on that strange doctrine of _abstract ideas_.
And here I cannot but remark, how nearly the vague and indeterminate
description of matter, or corporeal substance, which the modern
philosophers are run into by their own principles, resembles that
antiquated and so much ridiculed notion of _materia prima_, to be met
with in Aristotle and his followers. Without extension, solidity cannot
be conceived; since, therefore, it has been shown that extension exists
not in an unthinking substance, the same must also be true of solidity.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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