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
CHAPTER I.—OF SENSE.—‘Concerning the thoughts of man, I will consider
them, first singly, and afterwards in train, or dependence upon one
another. Singly, they are every one a representation or appearance of
some quality or other accident of a body without us; which is commonly
called an _object_: Which object worketh on the eyes, ears, and other
parts of man’s body; and by diversity of working, produceth diversity of
appearances.
‘The Original of them all is that which we call SENSE: For there is no
conception in a man’s mind which hath not at first, totally or by parts,
been begotten upon the organs of sense. The rest are derived from that
original.
‘The cause of sense is the external body or object which presseth the
organ proper to each sense, either immediately as in the taste and
touch, or mediately as in seeing, hearing, and smelling: which pressure
by the mediation of nerves, and other strings and membranes of the body,
continued inwards to the Brain and Heart, causeth there a resistance or
counter-pressure, or endeavour of the heart to deliver itself: which
endeavour, because _outward_, seemeth to be some matter without. And
this seeming or fancy is that which men call sense: and consisteth to
the eye, in a light or colour figured; to the ear, in a sound; to the
nostril, in an odour; to the tongue and palate, in a savour, and to the
rest of the body in heat, cold, hardness, softness, and such other
qualities, as we discern by feeling. All which qualities called
_sensible_ are in the object that causeth them but so many several
motions of the matter by which it presseth our organs diversely. Neither
in us that are pressed are they any thing else but divers motions; for
motion produceth nothing but motion. But their appearance to us is
fancy, the same waking as dreaming. And as pressing, rubbing, or
striking the eye maketh us fancy a light, and pressing the ear produceth
a din, so do the bodies also we see or hear produce the same by their
strong, though unobserved action. For if those colours and sounds were
in the bodies or objects that cause them, they could not be severed from
them, as by glasses and in echoes by reflection we see they are: where
we know the thing we see is in one place, the appearance in another, and
though at some certain distance, the real and very object seems invested
with the fancy it begets in us; yet still the object is one thing, the
image or fancy is another. So that sense in all cases is nothing else
but original fancy; caused, as I have said, by the pressure, that is, by
the motion of external things upon our eyes, ears, and other organs
thereunto ordained.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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