HYL. Hold, Philonous, I fear I was out in yielding intense heat to be a pain. It should seem rather, that pain is something distinct from heat, and the consequence or effect of it. PHIL. Upon putting your hand near the fire, do you perceive one simple uniform sensation, or two distinct sensations? HYL. But one simple sensation. PHIL. Is not the heat immediately perceived? HYL. It is. PHIL. And the pain? HYL. True. PHIL. Seeing therefore they are both immediately perceived at the same time, and the fire affects you only with one simple or uncompounded idea, it follows that this same simple idea is both the intense heat immediately perceived, and the pain; and, consequently, that the intense heat immediately perceived is nothing distinct from a particular sort of pain. HYL. It seems so. PHIL. Again, try in your thoughts, Hylas, if you can conceive a vehement sensation to be without pain or pleasure. HYL. I cannot. PHIL. Or can you frame to yourself an idea of sensible pain or pleasure in general, abstracted from every particular idea of heat, cold, tastes, smells? &c. HYL. I do not find that I can. PHIL. Doth it not therefore follow, that sensible pain is nothing distinct from those sensations or ideas, in an intense degree? HYL. It is undeniable; and, to speak the truth, I begin to suspect a very great heat cannot exist but in a mind perceiving it. PHIL. What! are you then in that sceptical state of suspense, between affirming and denying? HYL. I think I may be positive in the point. A very violent and painful heat cannot exist without the mind. PHIL. It hath not therefore according to you, any REAL being? HYL. I own it. PHIL. Is it therefore certain, that there is no body in nature really hot? HYL. I have not denied there is any real heat in bodies. I only say, there is no such thing as an intense real heat. PHIL. But, did you not say before that all degrees of heat were equally real; or, if there was any difference, that the greater were more undoubtedly real than the lesser? HYL. True: but it was because I did not then consider the ground there is for distinguishing between them, which I now plainly see. And it is this: because intense heat is nothing else but a particular kind of painful sensation; and pain cannot exist but in a perceiving being; it follows that no intense heat can really exist in an unperceiving corporeal substance. But this is no reason why we should deny heat in an inferior degree to exist in such a substance. PHIL. But how shall we be able to discern those degrees of heat which exist only in the mind from those which exist without it? HYL. That is no difficult matter. You know the least pain cannot exist unperceived; whatever, therefore, degree of heat is a pain exists only in the mind. But, as for all other degrees of heat, nothing obliges us to think the same of them.