postulated a miracle in what he uttered, we should have little to say against him, (for the whole process of sensation is indeed miraculous.) But he postulates more than a miracle; he postulates a contradiction, in the very contemplation of which our reason is unhinged.
2. Another man will deny that our sensations ever transcend the sphere of sense, or attain a real objective existence. "Colour, hardness, figure, and so forth," he will say, "are generated within the sphere of sense, in obedience to its own original laws. They form integral parts of the sphere; and he who endeavours to construe them to his own mind as embodied in extrinsic independent existences, must for ever be foiled in the attempt." This man declines giving any answer to the problem. We ask, how can our sensations be embodied in distinct permanent realities? And he replies, that they never are and never can be so embodied. This man is an Idealist—or as we would term him, (to distinguish him from another species about to be mentioned, of the same genus,) an Acosmical Idealist; that is, an Idealist who absolutely denies the existence of an independent material world.
3. A third man will postulate as the cause of our sensations of hardness, colour, &c., a transcendent something, of which he knows nothing, except that he feigns and fables it as lying external to the sphere of sense: and then, by referring our sensations to this unknown cause, he will obtain for them, not certainly the externality desiderated, but a quasi-externality, which he palms off upon himself and us as the best that can be supplied. This man is a Cosmothetical Idealist: that is, an Idealist who postulates an external universe as the unknown cause of certain modifications we are conscious of within ourselves, and which, according to his view, we never really get beyond. This species of speculator is the commonest, but he is the least trustworthy of any; and his fallacies are all the more dangerous by reason of the air of plausibility with which they are invested. From first to last, he represents us as the dupes of our own perfidious nature. By some inexplicable process of association, he refers certain known effects to certain unknown causes; and would thus explain to us how these effects (our sensations) come to assume, as it were, the character of external objects. But we know not "as it were." Away with such shuffling phraseology. There is nothing either of reference, or of inference, or of quasi- truthfulness in our apprehension of the material universe. It is ours with a certainty which laughs to scorn all the deductions of logic, and all the props of hypothesis. What we wish to know is, how our subjective affections can be, not as it were, but in God's truth, and In the strict, literal, earnest, and unambiguous sense of the words, real independent, objective existences. This is what the cosmothetical idealist never can explain, and never attempts to explain.
4. We now come to the answer which the reader, who has followed us thus far, will be prepared to find us putting forward as by far the most important of any, and as containing in fact the very kernel of the solution. A fourth man will say—"If the whole sphere of sense could only be withdrawn inwards—could be made to fall somewhere within itself—then the whole difficulty would disappear, and the problem would be solved at once. The sensations which existed previous to this retraction or withdrawal, would then, of necessity, fall without the sphere of sense, (see our second diagram;) and in doing so, they would necessarily assume a totally different aspect from that of sensations. They would be real independent objects: and (what is the important part of the demonstration) they would acquire this status without overstepping by a hair's-breadth the primary limits of the sphere. Were such phraseology allowable, we should say that the sphere has understepped itself, and in doing so, has left its former contents high and dry, and stamped with all the marks which can characterize objective existences."
Now the reader will please to remark, that we are very far from desiring him to accept this last solution at our bidding. Our method, we trust, is any thing but dogmatical. We merely say, that if this can be shown to be the case, then the demonstration which we are in the course of unfolding, will hardly fail to recommend itself to his acceptance. Whether or not it is the case, can only be established by an appeal to our experience.
