though we cannot discover other forms and magnitudes, we yet discover its extension, and consequently its figure, by the immediate sense of touch ?or may we not rather conclude with confidence, that what is true of other forms is true of this also, that it is only in consequence of more frequent experience we have learned as it were to distinguish, with some degree of certainty, the simpler forms, which, as mere forms, are not more direct objects of the sense of touch than forms the most irregular; and that without such experience, therefore, our mere sense of touch is incapable of informing us of the figure of bodies, immediately and originally.

If then the knowledge of extension be not derived from our immediate sense of touch, it must be derived from some other source, which allows it to be associated with the feelings of touch, and afterwards suggested by these, in the same manner as distant extent, in the case of vision, is suggested by a few slight varieties of colour. Let us endeavour, then, since some such source there must be, to discover what the source is.

LECTURE XXIII.

ANALYSIS OF THE FEELINGS USUALLY ASCRIBED TO THE SENSE OF

TOUCH, CONTINUED.

My last Lecture, gentlemen, was employed in considering the information which we receive from the sense of touch, or rather the information which we are commonly supposed to receive from that sense, but which, in a great part at least, I am inclined to ascribe to another source.

The qualities of bodies, supposed to be made known to us by touch, I reduced to two, of which all-whatever be the variety of names that express them, are mere varieties, RESISTANCE and EXTENSION :-solidity, liquidity, viscidity, hardness, softness, roughness, smoothness, being modes of RESISTANCE, and nothing more ;-figure, magnitude, divisibility, as evidently nothing more than modes of EXTENSION: and I stated reasons which induce me to believe, that neither our feeling of resistance nor that of extension, has its direct origin in the sense of touch; though the original simple feeling, which this organ affords, is now, from constant association, almost indissolubly combined with both, in some one or other of their varieties.

The first of these classes,-that which includes the various modifications of resistance,-I examined at great length, and showed, I trust, that it is not to our organ of touch we are indebted for these, but that they are feelings of another sense, of which our muscular frame is the organ, the feelings, in short, of which every one must have been conscious, who has attempted to grasp any body, or to press against it, when the full contraction of the muscles must, of course, have been impeded. According According as the body is hard or soft, rough or smooth, that is to say, according as it resists, in various degrees, the progress of our effort of contraction-the muscular feeling, which arises from the variously impeded effort, will vary in proportion; and we call hard, soft, rough, smooth, that which produces one or other of the varieties of these muscular feelings of resistance, as we term sweet or bitter, blue or

yellow, that which produces either of these sensations of taste or vision. With the feeling of resistance, there is, indeed, in every case, combined, a certain tactual feeling, because we must touch whatever we attempt to grasp; but it is not of the mere tactual feeling we think, when we term bodies hard or soft, it is of the greater or less resistance which they afford to our muscular contraction.

I next proceeded to consider the other class of supposed tangible qualities, which includes the various modifications of extension, and urged many arguments to show, in like manner, that, however indissolubly these may seem at present to be connected with the simple feelings of our organ of touch,it is not to our simple original feelings of this sense, that we owe our knowledge of them, as qualities of things without.

Though the notion of extension, however, may arise in the manner which I have supposed, this, it may be said, is not the notion of external existence. To what, then, are we to ascribe the belief of external reality, which now accompanies our sensations of touch? It appears to me to depend on the feeling of resistance, the organ of which, as a muscular feeling, I before explained to you, which breaking in, without any known cause of difference, on an accustomed series, and combining with the notion of extension, and consequently of divisibility, previously acquired, furnishes the elements of that compound notion, which we term the notion of matter. Extension, resistance;―to combine these simple notions in something which is not ourselves, and to have the notion of matter, are precisely the same thing; as it is the same thing to have combined the head and neck of a man with the body and legs of a horse, and to have the notion of that fabulous being which the ancients denominated a centaur. It certainly, at least, would not be easy for any one to define matter more simply, than as that which has parts, and that which resists our effort to grasp it; and, in our analysis of the feelings of infancy, we have been able to discover how both these notions may have arisen in the mind, and arisen too, in circumstances which must lead to the combination of them in one complex notion.

The infant stretches out his arm for the first time, by that volition without a known object, which is either a mere instinct, or very near akin to one,this motion is accompanied with a certain feeling, he repeats the volition which moves his arm fifty or one thousand times, and the same progress of feeling takes place during the muscular action. In this repeated progress, he feels the truth of that intuitive proposition, which, in the whole course of the life that awaits him, is to be the source of all his expectations, and the guide of all his actions, the simple proposition, that what has been as an antecedent, will be followed by what has been as a consequent. At length he stretches out his arm again, and, instead of the accustomed progression, there arises, in the resistance of some object opposed to him, a feeling of a very different kind, which, if he persevere in his voluntary effort, increases gradually to severe pain, before he has half completed the usual progress. There is a difference, therefore, which we may, without any absurdity, suppose to astonish the little reasoner; for the expectation of similar consequents, from similar antecedents, is observable even in his earliest actions, and is probably the result of an original law of mind, as universal as that which renders certain sensations of sight and sound the immediate result of certain affections of our eye or ear. To any being, who is thus impressed with belief of similarities of sequence, a different consequent necessarily VOL. I.

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implies a difference of the antecedent. In the case at present supposed, however, the infant, who as yet knows nothing but himself, is conscious of no previous difference; and the feeling of resistance seems to him, therefore, something unknown, which has its cause in something that is not himself.

I am aware, that the application to an infant, of a process of reasoning, expressed in terms of such grave and formal philosophic nomenclature, has some chance of appearing ridiculous. But the reasoning itself is very different from the terms employed to express it, and is truly as simple and natural as the terms, which our language obliges us to employ in expressing it, are abstract and artificial. The infant, however, in his feeling of similarity of antecedents and consequents, and of the necessity, therefore, of a new antecedent, where the consequent is different, has the reasoning, but not the terms. He does not form the proposition as universal, and applicable to cases that have not yet existed; but he feels it in every particular case as it occurs. That he does truly reason, with at least as much subtilty as is involved in the process now supposed, cannot be doubted by those who attend to the manifest results of his little inductions, in those acquisitions of knowledge which show themselves in the actions, and, I may say, almost in the very looks of the little reasoner, at a period long before that to which his own remembrance is afterwards to extend, when, in the maturer progress of his intellectual powers, the darkness of eternity will meet his eye alike, whether he attempt to gaze on the past, or on the future; and the wish to know the events with which he is afterwards to be occupied and interested, will not be more unavailing than the wish to retrace events that were the occupation and interest of the most important years of his existence. Then,

Even then, many a process of ratiocination is going on, which might have served as an example of strict logic to Aristotle himself, and which affords results far more valuable to the individual reasoner than all the contents of all the folios of the crowd of that great logician's scholastic commentators.

That the notions of extension and external resistance, which are thus supposed to be acquired from the progressive contraction of muscles, and the difficulty opposed to their accustomed contraction, which introduces suddenly a new feeling, when all the antecedent feelings had been the same, should be directly combined only with the sensations of touch, cannot appear wonderful, when we reflect, that it is only in the case of touch there is that frequent co-existence or immediate succession which is necessary to the subsequent union. In the case of the acquired perceptions of vision, it might, in like manner, be asked, why is it that we do not smell the exact distance of a rose, as we see its exact distance as soon as we have turned our eye on the bush on which the rose is growing? And the only answer which can be given, is, that there has not been in smell that exact and frequent co-existence of feelings which has occurred in vision. It surely is not more wonderful,

* Darwin's Botanic Garden, Canto III. v. 353, 354, and 357—360.

therefore, that the same argument should hold in the acquired perceptions of touch, in which the co-existence is still far more frequent and exact. When we listen to a flute, our muscles may be contracted as before, or quiescent as before; when the odour of a rose is wafted to us, not a single muscle may be more or less affected. But without the action of muscles we cannot grasp a ball, or press against a resisting body, nor move our hand along its surface. Whatever feelings, therefore, are involved in muscular contraction, may be, or rather I may say, if the common laws of association operate, must be associated with the simple feelings thus constantly co-existing, whatever they may be, which the organ of touch originally affords. To suppose, that, in a case of such frequent co-existence or succession, no association takes place, and that our feelings of touch are, at this moment, as simple as they were originally, would surely be to suppose the universal influence of the associating principle to be suspended in this particular case.

I have already explained the manner in which I suppose the infant to obtain the notion of something external and separate from himself, by the interruption of the usual train of antecedents and consequents, when the painful feeling of resistance has arisen, without any change of circumstances of which the mind is conscious in itself; and the process, by which he acquires this notion is only another form of the very process which, during the whole course of his life, is involved in all his reasonings, and regulates, therefore, all his conclusions with respect to every physical truth. In the view which I take of the subject, accordingly, I do not conceive that it is by any peculiar intuition we are led to believe in the existence of things without. I consider this belief as the effect of that more general intuition by which we consider a new consequent, in any series of accustomed events, as the sign of a new antecedent, and of that equally general principle of association, by which feelings that have frequently co-existed, flow together, and constitute afterwards one complex whole. There is something which is not ourself, something which is representative of length-something which excites the feeling of resistance to our effort; and these elements combined, are matter. But, whether the notion arise in the manner I have supposed, or differently, there can be no doubt that it has arisen long before the period to which our memory reaches; and the belief of an external world, therefore, whether founded directly on an intuitive principle of belief, or, as I rather think, on associations as powerful as intuition in the period which alone we know, may be said to be an essential part of our mental constitution, at least as far back as that constitution can be made the subject of philosophic inquiry. Whatever it may have been originally, it is now as impossible for us to disbelieve the reality of some external cause of our sensations, as it is impossible for us to disbelieve the existence of the sensations themselves. On this subject, scepticism may be ingenious in vain; and equally vain, I may say, would be the attempted confutation of scepticism, since it cannot affect the serious internal belief of the sceptic, which is the same before as after argument ;unshaken by the ingenuity of his own reasonings, or rather, as I have before remarked, tacitly assumed and affirmed in that very combat of argument which professes to deny it.

It is in vain that Berkeley asserts his system, with a zeal and acuteness which might, perhaps, have succeeded in convincing others, if they could only have previously succeeded in convincing himself, not as a speculative philosopher merely, but as a human being, conversant with his kind, acting,

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and suffering, and remembering, and hoping, and fearing. This, however, was more than mere ingenuity of argument could perform. Even in publishing his work with the sincere desire of instructing and converting others, the great and primary convert was yet to be made in the converter himself.

In the life of Berkeley, prefixed to the edition of his collected works, an account is given of a visit which he paid, at Paris, to Malebranche, the celebrated author of a system in many respects similar to his own. He found him in a weak state of health, but abundantly eager to enter into disputation, on a science which he loved, and especially on his own doctrines, which he loved still more; but the discussion was at last carried on with more vehemence than the feeble bodily frame of Malebranche could bear; and his death was said to be occasioned, or at least hastened, by this unfortunate intellectual combat. When we consider this interview of two illustrious men, each of whom, in accordance with his own system, must have been incapable of any direct knowledge of the existence of the other, the violent reciprocal action of these mutual nonentities might seem ludicrous, if there were not, in the death of any one, and especially of a philosopher so estimable in every respect as the author of The Search of Truth, something too serious to be consistent with any feeling of levity. It is more suitable, both to the occasion itself and to our own intellectual weakness, to regard this accidental interview of two philosophers, contending so strenuously against each other for the truth of doctrines, which rendered the real existence of each, at best, very problematical, as only a striking instance of the readiness with which all the pride of human reason yields itself, as it were, spontaneously and humbly, to the sway of those more powerful principles, which He, who has arranged our mental constitution, has so graciously accommodated to the circumstances in which He has placed us. The gift of reason itself, that most inestimable of our intellectual gifts, would have been truly, if nothing more had been added to it, a perilous acquisition to beings not absolutely incapable of error; since these are points on which a single mistake, if there had been no opportunity of repairing it, might have been fatal, not to our happiness merely, but to our very existence. On these points, however, Nature has not left us to a power so fallible, and to indolence, which might forget to exercise even this feeble power. She has given us principles which do not err, and which operate without the necessity of any effort on our part. In the wildest speculative errors into which we may be led, there is a voice within which speaks, indeed, only in a whisper, but in a whisper of omnipotence, at which the loud voice that led us astray is still,—thus operating on our mind as the secret irresistible influence of gravitation operates on our body, preserving it, amid all the disorder and irregularity of its spontaneous motions, still attached to that earthly home which has been prepared with every bountiful provision for our temporary residence.

If there were, indeed, any sceptic as to the existence of an external world, who could seriously profess that his practical conduct was in accordance with his speculative disbelief, we might very justly exercise, with respect to his own profession, that philosophic doubt or disbelief which he recommends. Pyrrho, the great founder of this philosophy, is, indeed, said to have acted so truly on his principles, that if a cart ran against him, or a dog attacked him, or if he came upon a precipice, he would not stir a foot to avoid the danger. "But his attendants," says Dr. Reid," who, happily for him, were not so great sceptics, took care to keep him out of harm's way, so that he