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A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge by George Berkeley
page 30 of 112 (26%)
sounds, heat cold, and suchlike secondary qualities, do not--which they
tell us are sensations existing IN THE MIND ALONE, that depend on and are
occasioned by the different size, texture, and motion of the minute
particles of matter. This they take for an undoubted truth, which they can
demonstrate beyond all exception. Now, if it be certain that those
original qualities ARE INSEPARABLY UNITED WITH THE OTHER SENSIBLE
QUALITIES, and not, even in thought, capable of being abstracted
from them, it plainly follows that they exist only in the mind.
But I desire any one to reflect and try whether he can, by any
abstraction of thought, conceive the extension and motion of a
body without all other sensible qualities. For my own part, I see
evidently that it is not in my power to frame an idea of a body
extended and moving, but I must withal give it some colour or other
sensible quality which is ACKNOWLEDGED to exist only in the mind. In
short, extension, figure, and motion, abstracted from all other
qualities, are inconceivable. Where therefore the other sensible
qualities are, there must these be also, to wit, in the mind and nowhere
else.

11. A SECOND ARGUMENT AD HOMINEM.--Again, GREAT and SMALL, SWIFT and SLOW,
ARE ALLOWED TO EXIST NOWHERE WITHOUT THE MIND, being entirely
RELATIVE, and changing as the frame or position of the organs of
sense varies. The extension therefore which exists without the
mind is neither great nor small, the motion neither swift nor slow,
that is, they are nothing at all. But, say you, they are extension
in general, and motion in general: thus we see how much the tenet
of extended movable substances existing without the mind depends on
the strange doctrine of ABSTRACT IDEAS. And here I cannot but remark how
nearly the vague and indeterminate description of Matter or corporeal
substance, which the modern philosophers are run into by their own
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