explicitly deny the truth of the fifth proposition, though some
of Berkeley's supporters, less careful than himself, have done so.
Indeed, it must be confessed that it is only grudgingly, and as it
were against his will, that Berkeley admits that we obtain ideas of
extension, figure, and magnitude by pure vision, and that he more than
half retracts the admission; while he absolutely denies that sight
gives us any notion of outness in either sense of the word, and even
declares that "no proper visual idea appears to be without the mind,
or at any distance off." By "proper visual ideas," Berkeley denotes
colours, and light, and shade; and, therefore, he affirms that colours
do not appear to be at any distance from us. I confess that this
assertion appears to me to be utterly unaccountable. I have made
endless experiments on this point, and by no effort of the imagination
can I persuade myself, when looking at a colour, that the colour is
in my mind, and not at a "distance off," though of course I know
perfectly well, as a matter of reason, that colour is subjective. It
is like looking at the sun setting, and trying to persuade oneself
that the earth appears to move and not the sun, a feat I have never
been able to accomplish. Even when the eyes are shut, the darkness
of which one is conscious, carries with it the notion of outness. One
looks, so to speak, into a dark space. Common language expresses the
common experience of mankind in this matter. A man will say that a
smell is in his nose, a taste in his mouth, a singing in his ears, a
creeping or a warmth in his skin; but if he is jaundiced, he does not
say that he has yellow in his eyes, but that everything looks yellow;
and if he is troubled with _muscae volitantes_, he says, not that he
has specks in his eyes, but that he sees specks dancing before his
eyes. In fact, it appears to me that it is the special peculiarity
of visual sensations, that they invariably give rise to the idea of
remoteness, and that Berkeley's dictum ought to be reversed. For I