Book-bot.com - read famous books online for free

The Relations Between Religion and Science - Eight Lectures Preached Before the University of Oxford in the Year 1884 by Frederick Temple
page 32 of 147 (21%)
our sensations, into two great classes. He selects as the main but not
universal characteristic of the one class, vividness; of the other
class, faintness; a distinction first insisted on, though somewhat
differently applied, by Hume. He adds various other characteristics of
each class, some of them implying very questionable propositions. And we
come finally to the following astonishing result. Sensations are divided
into two classes; each has seven main characteristics which distinguish
it from the other. One of these classes make up the subject, that which
I mean when I use the words I myself; the other the object or that
which is not I. But there is absolutely nothing to determine which is
which, which class is the subject and which is the object, which is I
myself, and which is not I myself. Vividness and faintness plainly have
nothing in them by which we can assign the one to that which is I, the
other to that which is not I. If we were to conjecture, we should be
disposed to say that surely the most vivid sensations must be the
nearest and therefore must be part of that which is I; but we find it is
quite the other way. The faint sensations are characteristic of that
which is I, and the vivid of that which is not I. And the same remark
applies to each pair of characteristics in succession. The fact is that
Mr. Spencer has omitted what is essential to complete his argument; he
has not shown, nor endeavoured to show, nor even thought of showing, how
out of his seven characteristics of the subject the conception of a
subject has grown. It is quite plain that he not only makes his classes
first and finds his characteristics afterwards, which we may admit to
have been inevitable; but he fails altogether to show how that by which
we know the classes apart has grown out of the characteristics that he
has given us. The characteristics which he assigns to that which is I,
all added together, do not in the slightest degree account for that
sense of permanent existence in spite of changes which lies at the root
of my distinction of myself from other things. The very word same, in
DigitalOcean Referral Badge