ated spirit, it must either have no
existence at all, or else subsist in the mind of some eternal spirit."

So much for pain. Now let us consider an ordinary sensation. Let the
point of the pin be gently rested upon the skin, and I become aware
of a feeling or condition of consciousness quite different from the
former--the sensation of what I call "touch." Nevertheless this touch
is plainly just as much in myself as the pain was. I cannot for a
moment conceive this something which I call touch as existing apart
from myself, or a being capable of the same feelings as myself. And
the same reasoning applies to all the other simple sensations. A
moment's reflection is sufficient to convince one that the smell, and
the taste, and the yellowness, of which we become aware when an
orange is smelt, tasted, and seen, are as completely states of our
consciousness as is the pain which arises if the orange happens to
be too sour. Nor is it less clear that every sound is a state of the
consciousness of him who hears it. If the universe contained only
blind and deaf beings, it is impossible for us to imagine but that
darkness and silence should reign everywhere.

It is undoubtedly true, then, of all the simple sensations that,
as Berkeley says, their "_esse_ is _percipi_"--their being is to be
"perceived or known." But that which perceives, or knows, is mind
or spirit; and therefore that knowledge which the senses give us is,
after all, a knowledge of spiritual phenomena.

All this was explicitly or implicitly admitted, and, indeed, insisted
upon, by Berkeley's contemporaries, and by no one more strongly than
by Locke, who terms smells, tastes, colours, sounds, and the like,
"secondary qualities," and observes, with respect to these "secondary
qualities," that "whatever reality we by mistake attribute to them
[they] are in truth nothing in the objects themselves."

And again: "Flame is denominated hot and light; snow, white and cold;
and manna, white and sweet, from the ideas they produce in us; which
qualities are commonly thought to be the same in these bodies; that
those ideas are in us, the one the perfect resemblance of the other
as they are in a mirror; and it would by most men be judged very
extravagant if one should say otherwise. And yet he that will consider
that the same fire that at one distance produces in us the sensation
of warmth, does at a nearer approach produce in us the far different
sensation of pain, ought to