Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 3 "Philosophical Remains" (1883 ed.).djvu/348

quite different from their visible magnitude? These are the two fundamental questions of the Berkeleian optics; and in endeavouring to answer them, we must go to work experimentally, and strive to apprehend the virgin facts of seeing, uncombined with any other facts we may have become acquainted with from other sources. Let us suppose, then, that we are merely an eye, which, however, as it is not yet either tangible or localised, we shall call the soul, the seer. Let this seer be provided with a due complement of objects, which are mere colours in the form of houses, clouds, rivers, woods, and mountains. Everything is excluded but sight and colours. Nothing but pure seeing is the order of the day. Now, here it is obvious that the seer must pronounce itself or its organ to be precisely commensurate in extent with the things seen. It may either suppose the diameter of the landscape to be conformed to the size of its diameter, or it may suppose its diameter conformed to the size of the landscape. It is quite immaterial which it does, but one or other of these judgments it must form. The seer and the seen must be pronounced to be coextensive with one another. No judgment to a contrary effect, no judgment that the organ is infinitely disproportioned to its objects, is as yet possible. Well, we shall suppose that these objects keep shifting up and down within the sphere of the organ, growing larger and smaller, fainter and brighter in colour, and so forth. Still no new result takes place: there is still nothing