Critiques and Addresses Part 23

Suppose that a piano were conscious of sound, and of nothing else. It would become acquainted with a system of nature entirely composed of sounds, and the laws of nature would be the laws of melody and of harmony. It might acquire endless ideas of likeness and unlikeness, of succession, of similarity and dissimilarity, but it could attain to no conception of s.p.a.ce, of distance, or of resistance; or of figure, or of motion.

The piano might then reason thus: All my knowledge consists of sounds and the perception of the relations of sounds; now the being of sound is to be heard; and it is inconceivable that the existence of the sounds I know, should depend upon any other existence than that of the mind of a hearing being.

This would be quite as good reasoning as Berkeley's, and very sound and useful, so far as it defines the limits of the piano's faculties.

But for all that, pianos have an existence quite apart from sounds, and the auditory consciousness of our speculative piano would be dependent, in the first place, on the existence of a "substance" of bra.s.s, wood, and iron, and, in the second, on that of a musician. But of neither of these conditions of the existence of his consciousness would the phenomena of that consciousness afford him the slightest hint.

So that while it is the summit of human wisdom to learn the limit of our faculties, it may be wise to recollect that we have no more right to make denials, than to put forth affirmatives, about what lies beyond that limit. Whether either mind, or matter, has a "substance"

or not, is a problem which we are incompetent to discuss; and it is just as likely that the common notions upon the subject should be correct as any others. Indeed, Berkeley himself makes Philonous wind up his discussions with Hylas, in a couple of sentences which aptly express this conclusion:--

"You see, Hylas, the water of yonder fountain, how it is forced upwards in a round column to a certain height, at which it breaks and falls back into the basin from whence it rose; its ascent as well as its descent proceeding from the same uniform law or principle of gravitation. Just so, the same principles which, at first view, lead to scepticism, pursued to a certain point, bring men back to common sense."

THE END.