Philosophy and Religion | Page 7

which knows {8} it. He may,
indeed, infer that this matter exists apart from the 'I' which knows it. He
may infer that it exists, and may even go as far as to assume that, apart
from his seeing or touching, or anybody else's seeing or touching,
matter possesses all those qualities which it possesses for his own
consciousness. But this is inference, and not immediate knowledge.
And the validity or reasonableness of the inference may be disputed.
How far it is reasonable or legitimate to attribute to matter as it is in
itself the qualities which it has for us must depend upon the nature of
those qualities. Let us then go on to ask whether the qualities which
constitute matter as we know it are qualities which we can reasonably
or even intelligibly attribute to a supposed matter-in-itself, to matter
considered as something capable of existing by itself altogether apart
from any kind of conscious experience.
In matter, as we know it, there are two elements. There are certain
sensations, or certain qualities which we come to know by sensation,
and there are certain relations. Now, with regard to the sensations, a
very little reflection will, I think, show us that it is absolutely
meaningless to say that matter has the qualities implied by these
sensations, even when they are not felt, and would still possess them,
even supposing it never had been and never would be felt by any one
whatever. In a world in which {9} there were no eyes and no minds,
what would be the meaning of saying that things were red or blue? In a
world in which there were no ears and no minds, there would clearly be
no such thing as sound. This is exactly the point at which Locke's
analysis stopped. He admitted that the 'secondary qualities'--colours,
sounds, tastes--of objects were really not in the things themselves but in
the mind which perceives them. What existed in the things was merely

a power of producing these sensations in us, the quality in the thing
being not in the least like the sensations which it produces in us: he
admitted that this power of producing a sensation was something
different from, and totally unlike, the sensation itself. But when he
came to the primary qualities--solidity, shape, magnitude and the
like--he supposed that the qualities in the thing were exactly the same
as they are for our minds. If all mind were to disappear from the
Universe, there would henceforth be no red and blue, no hot and cold;
but things would still be big or small, round or square, solid or fluid.
Yet, even with these 'primary qualities' the reference to mind is really
there just as much as in the case of the secondary qualities; only the
fact is not quite so obvious. And one reason for this is that these
primary qualities involve, much more glaringly and unmistakably than
the secondary, something which is not mere sensation--something
which {10} implies thought and not mere sense. What do we mean by
solidity, for instance? We mean partly that we get certain sensations
from touching the object--sensations of touch and sensations of what is
called the muscular sense, sensations of muscular exertion and of
pressure resisted. Now, so far as that is what solidity means, it is clear
that the quality in question involves as direct a reference to our
subjective feelings as the secondary qualities of colour and sound. But
something more than this is implied in our idea of solidity. We think of
external objects as occupying space. And spaciality cannot be analysed
away into mere feelings of ours. The feelings of touch which we derive
from an object come to us one after the other. No mental reflection
upon sensations which come one after the other in time could ever give
us the idea of space, if they were not spacially related from the first. It
is of the essence of spaciality that the parts of the object shall be
thought of as existing side by side, outside one another. But this
side-by-sideness, this outsideness, is after all a way in which the things
present themselves to a mind. Space is made up of relations; and what
is the meaning of relations apart from a mind which relates, or for
which the things are related? If spaciality were a quality of the thing in
itself, it would exist no matter what became of other things. It would be
quite possible, therefore, {11} that the top of this table should exist
without the bottom: yet everybody surely would admit the
meaninglessness of talking about a piece of matter (no matter how

small, be it an atom or the smallest electron conceived by the most
recent physical speculation) which had a top