A System of Logic: Ratiocinative and Inductive, 7th Edition, Vol. I — John Stuart Mill — John Shaqi
A System of Logic: Ratiocinative and Inductive, 7th Edition, Vol. I
John Stuart Mill · en
Thus, then, as body is the unsentient cause to which we are naturally
prompted to refer a certain portion of our feelings, so mind may be
described as the sentient _subject_ (in the scholastic sense of the
term) of all feelings; that which has or feels them. But of the nature
of either body or mind, further than the feelings which the former
excites, and which the latter experiences, we do not, according to the
best existing doctrine, know anything; and if anything, logic has
nothing to do with it, or with the manner in which the knowledge is
acquired. With this result we may conclude this portion of our subject,
and pass to the third and only remaining class or division of Nameable
Things.
III. ATTRIBUTES: AND, FIRST, QUALITIES.
§ 9. From what has already been said of Substance, what is to be said of
Attribute is easily deducible. For if we know not, and cannot know,
anything of bodies but the sensations which they excite in us or in
others, those sensations must be all that we can, at bottom, mean by
their attributes; and the distinction which we verbally make between the
properties of things and the sensations we receive from them, must
originate in the convenience of discourse rather than in the nature of
what is signified by the terms.
Attributes are usually distributed under the three heads of Quality,
Quantity, and Relation. We shall come to the two latter presently: in
the first place we shall confine ourselves to the former.
Let us take, then, as our example, one of what are termed the sensible
qualities of objects, and let that example be whiteness. When we ascribe
whiteness to any substance, as, for instance, snow; when we say that
snow has the quality whiteness, what do we really assert? Simply, that
when snow is present to our organs, we have a particular sensation,
which we are accustomed to call the sensation of white. But how do I
know that snow is present? Obviously by the sensations which I derive
from it, and not otherwise. I infer that the object is present, because
it gives me a certain assemblage or series of sensations. And when I
ascribe to it the attribute whiteness, my meaning is only, that, of the
sensations composing this group or series, that which I call the
sensation of white colour is one.