Conversations on the Elements of Metaphysics - Softcover

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This historic book may have numerous typos, missing text or index. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. 1838. Not illustrated. Excerpt: ... "These ideas having entered the mind, intermingle, unite, separate, throw themselves into various combinations and postures, and thereby generate new ideas of reflection, strictly so called, such as those of comparing, dividing, distinguishing, of abstraction, relation, with many others; all which remain with us as a stock for our further use upon future occasions. "Here, perhaps, I shall be put in mind that I have before supposed two substances necessarily concurring in every action, one to act, and the other to be acted upon; and thereupon asked whether I conceive ideas to be substances? To which I answer, no. "What those substances are, whereof our ideas are the modification, whether parts of the mind, as the members are of our body, or contained in it like wafers in a box, or enveloped by it like fish in water, as many expressions, current in use, might lead us to imagine, whether of a spiritual, corporeal,or middle nature between both, I need not now ascertain. All I mean at present to lay down is this: that in every exercise of the undertanding, that which discerns is numerically and substantially distinct from that which is discerned; and that an act of understanding is not so much our own proper act as the act of something else operating upon us." If the suppositions made by these authors were established, they would still leave the phenomenon of sensation unexplained. We know that when the sensation of vision is produced, light is transmitted through the several humours of the eye as it is through the lenses of a Camera obscura, and an image of the object from which the rays are reflected, is painted on the retina, whence proceeds a nerve terminating in the brain. This organization we know to be an indispensable condition of seeing; for if any of these ...