| The opinions of the antient philosophers, their fictions of substance and accident, and their reasonings concerning substantial forms and occult qualities, are like the spectres in the dark, and are derived from principles, which, however common, are neither universal nor unavoidable in human nature. |
| The modern philosophy pretends to be entirely free from this defect, and to arise only from the solid, permanent, and consistent principles of the imagination. |
| Upon what grounds this pretension is founded must now be the subject of our enquiry. |
| The fundamental principle of that philosophy is the opinion concerning colours, sounds, tastes, smells, heat and cold; which it asserts to be nothing but impressions in the mind, derived from the operation of external objects, and without any resemblance to the qualities of the objects. |
| Upon examination, I find only one of the reasons commonly produced for this opinion to be satisfactory, viz. |
| that derived from the variations of those impressions, even while the external object, to all appearance, continues the same. |
| These variations depend upon several circumstances. |
| Upon the different situations of our health: A man in a malady feels a disagreeable taste in meats, which before pleased him the most. |
| Upon the different complexions and constitutions of men That seems bitter to one, which is sweet to another. |
| Upon the difference of their external situation and position: Colours reflected from the clouds change according to the distance of the clouds, and according to the angle they make with the eye and luminous body. |
| Fire. also communicates the sensation of pleasure at one distance, and that of pain at another. |
| Instances of this kind are very numerous and frequent. |
| The conclusion drawn from them, is likewise as satisfactory as can possibly be imagined. |
| It is certain, that when different impressions of the same sense arise from any object, every one of these impressions has not a resembling quality existent in the object. |
| For as the same object cannot, at the same time, be endowed with different qualities of the same sense, and as the same quality cannot resemble impressions entirely different; it evidently follows, that many of our impressions have no external model or archetype. |
| Now from like effects we presume like causes. |
| Many of the impressions of colour, sound, &c. |
| are confest to be nothing but internal existences, and to arise from causes, which no ways resemble them. |
| These impressions are in appearance nothing different from the other impressions of colour, sound, &c. |
| We conclude, therefore, that they are, all of them, derived from a like origin. |
| This principle being once admitted, all the other doctrines of that philosophy seem to follow by an easy consequence. |