Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 3 "Philosophical Remains" (1883 ed.).djvu/369

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article in blackwood's magazine.
359

extension whatever is involved: for, in the next page, he informs us that all visual extension, or extended figure, "must be apprehended as either plane or solid, and that it is impossible even to conceive it otherwise." Consequently, if the figures we see are, as Berkeley says, apprehended neither as plane nor as solid, Mr Bailey, entertaining the notions he does on the subject of extension, must regard him as holding that they cannot be apprehended as extended at all; and accordingly such is the express representation he gives of the theory in the passage just quoted, where he says that "the doctrine of Berkeley, which affirms that the figures we see are neither plane nor solid [that is, are extended in no direction, according to Mr Bailey's ideas of extension], appears to him to be a part of the doctrine which asserts that visible objects are only internal feelings." Now if that be not teaching, in the plainest terms, that, according to Berkeley, no species of extension is implied in the internal feelings of vision, we know not what language means, and any one thought may be identical with its very opposite.

Here we might let the subject drop, having, as we conceive, said quite enough to prove the truth of our allegation that, in reference to the first question discussed, in which our original visual sensations are represented by Berkeley to be mere internal feelings, Mr Bailey understood and stated those feelings to signify sensations in which no perception of extension whatever was involved. However, as Mr