language, habit, and the teaching
of other men as well as by his own observation. He knows distance
because he is taught it by a more experienced judgment than his own; he
distinguishes sounds because he is told to remark them by a person of
a more discerning ear. And as we inherit from our parents or other
ancestors peculiar powers of sense or feeling, so we improve and
strengthen them, not only by regular teaching, but also by sympathy and
communion with other persons.

2. The second question, namely, that concerning the relation of the mind
to external objects, is really a trifling one, though it has been made
the subject of a famous philosophy. We may if we like, with Berkeley,
resolve objects of sense into sensations; but the change is one of name
only, and nothing is gained and something is lost by such a resolution
or confusion of them. For we have not really made a single step towards
idealism, and any arbitrary inversion of our ordinary modes of speech is
disturbing to the mind. The youthful metaphysician is delighted at his
marvellous discovery that nothing is, and that what we see or feel is
our sensation only: for a day or two the world has a new interest to
him; he alone knows the secret which has been communicated to him by the
philosopher, that mind is all--when in fact he is going out of his mind
in the first intoxication of a great thought. But he soon finds that
all things remain as they were--the laws of motion, the properties of
matter, the qualities of substances. After having inflicted his theories
on any one who is willing to receive them 'first on his father and
mother, secondly on some other patient listener, thirdly on his dog,'
he finds that he only differs from the rest of mankind in the use of a
word. He had once hoped that by getting rid of the solidity of matter he
might open a passage to worlds beyond. He liked to think of the world as
the representation of the divine nature, and delighted to imagine angels
and spirits wandering through space, present in the room in which he is
sitting without coming through the door, nowhere and everywhere at the
same instant. At length he finds that he has been the victim of his own
fancies; he has neither more nor less evidence of the supernatural than
he had before. He himself has become unsettled, but the laws of the
world remain fixed as at the beginning. He has discovered that his
appeal to the fallibility of sense was really an illusion. For whate