irst seemed red might now seem green, or what seemed red to one
spectator might seem green to the other. But as the same object cannot
itself be both red and green at the same time, it follows that what are
called its redness and greenness are not in it, but in the spectator.
Similarly, the sounds which an object appears to give forth neither are
nor ever were in it: they originate in the mind of the hearer, and have
not, and never have had any existence elsewhere. 'If the whole body were
an eye, where,' asks St. Paul, 'were the hearing? If the whole were
hearing, where were the smelling?' and Professor Huxley more than meets
the drift of the Apostle's questions by pronouncing it 'impossible to
imagine but that if the universe contained only blind and deaf beings,
darkness and silence would reign everywhere.'

And as with the secondary qualities of matter, so, on the same showing,
must it be with the primary. If colour, taste, scent, and the like,
exist nowhere but in the mind, so neither do extension, solidity, and
the like. If the former could not exist unless there were intelligent
minds to perceive them, then neither could the latter. For, by
extension and its cognates, we understand simply relations which we
conceive to exist between certain qualities of objects identical with
certain of our own visual and tactile sensations, or between these and
our consciousness of muscular effort; but inasmuch as all sensations and
all consciousness are purely mental, and exist nowhere but in the mind,
it follows necessarily that ideas of relation between different
sensations, or between sensations and consciousness, must also be purely
mental, and non-existent save in the mind. All the qualities of matter,
therefore, primary as well as secondary, are alike conceptions of the
mind, and consequently could not exist without a mind for them to be
conceived by and to exist in. But if the qualities did not exist, then
matter, which cannot be conceived otherwise than as an assemblage of
qualities, could not exist either. Wherefore in respect of matter
itself, as well as of the qualities of matter, _esse_ is _percipi_,
essence is perception, to be is to be perceived. Wherefore, finally, if
there were no mind to perceive matter, matter could not exist. Q. E.
D.[33]

Although in the foregoing summary of an argument to which not Berkeley
and Huxley alone, but others of the deepest and acutest thinkers that
this country has produced, have