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tertium quid as it is called, intervening between the knowing mind and the physical object.

What is known is never the physical object but always the idea or image.

But if we do not know the physical object we do not know anything about it. We do not know its attributes, its qualities or its powers. We do not know that it has the quality of being like the image, or even the power of causing the image, and we can only assume that it exists: we cannot know this.

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Berkeley saw this clearly. How can we possibly know," he asked, "whether our ideas agree with what ex hypothesi cannot be known at all?"

Locke himself, although maintaining at times that physical objects were like ideas, felt there was a flaw somewhere, and evolved his idea of " substance," which by bowdlerising the world of objects of all knowable qualities, made his view that the mind can never know them less improbable.

According to this view, all secondary qualities, such as colour and heat, are stripped from the physical world, and all that we are left with is some support or substratum to the qualities in the object which produce ideas in us.

We can never know what this support is, and it must of necessity be featureless, being "the same everywhere," but Locke conceives that we are driven logically to the assumption that it must exist. As a matter of fact we are driven logically

to no such assumption. It is a cunning move first to strip matter of all sensible qualities and then to say that it must exist as pure extension.

It is interesting to note that Descartes took the same view. "Nothing remains," he says, "in the idea of body except that it is something extended in length, breadth and depth; and this something is comprised in our idea of space, not only of that which is full of body, but even of what is called void space."

But as we can never know substance or body, we have no right to assume that it exists as pure extension. Our ideas might just as well be selfcreated, or spring from God, as be caused by an unknown and unknowable matter, and the logical outcome of the atomistic psychology is the complete destruction of the world of physical objects and the adoption of subjective idealism.

Thus all representationalist theories in positing the existence of a tertium quid between the mind and the physical world, make an unwarrantable assumption in assuming that there is a physical world at all.

And yet the number of philosophical theories which make this assumption at some stage or other in their explanation of perception is surprising.

Before considering the more modern theories which appear to reduce themselves to the Representationalist type, we must briefly consider the logical alternative to it, namely, Subjective Idealism.

II.

Subjective Idealism is the logical development of Representationalism. Locke left on the scene three entities, knowing mind, ideas known, and substance or matter as the physical support or substratum of the qualities causing the ideas.

Berkeley perceived, as we saw above, that as the third entity could not be known there was no reason to suppose that it existed.

Matter is therefore abolished in his philosophy, and we are left only with the knowing mind, and the idea known. The position is familiar enough. We experience only our own ideas. We have, therefore, no ground for supposing either that our ideas are caused by a material world, or that they exist when we are not perceiving them.

"For can there be a nicer strain of abstraction," says Berkeley," than to distinguish the existence of sensible objects from their being perceived, so as to conceive their existing unperceived."

From which it is but a step to the famous conclusion," That all the choir of heaven and furniture of the earth, in a word, all those bodies which comprise the mighty frame of the world have not any substance without a mind-that their being is to be perceived or known."

If we start from the atomistic psychology described above this conclusion is logically inevitable. It is, moreover, irrefutable.

As set forth by Berkeley, however, it has two weak spots. He does not believe that the ideas

cease to exist when we cease to perceive them. They continue to exist because they are still known by mind, though not by our minds. They are known by the mind of God, who puts them into our minds.

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How does Berkeley arrive at God? We have no experience of God, and no idea of Him. Therefore we can only know God a priori. But this conclusion is logically inadmissible on Berkeley's premiss which is that we can only know what we experience. Similarly, with the self, Berkeley assumes that it is the same I" which at different times knows different ideas. But we do not experience any idea of the continuity of self. Therefore the self also is known a priori. Berkeley says that we have a "notion" of the self. The notion" is not an idea but an inference from ideas. But Berkeley started with the assumption that we know only our own ideas.

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One more step, therefore, was required to carry the position to its logical conclusion. This was taken by Hume. Berkeley knocked out Locke's substance or matter. Hume knocked out Berkeley's two illogical postulates, namely, God and The Self.

We are then left with known ideas only, continually flowing modifications of a discontinuous consciousness, and we come to Solipsism or the belief that an individual's given psychical state is the only thing that exists in the Universe.

Like all extreme theories this has a gratifying

simplicity and on the psychological premises from which it starts is logically irrefutable. There is, however, not the slightest reason to suppose it to be true.

Against it may be urged the fundamental axiom of the realist position that the "act of knowing necessarily involves an object to be known, which is other than the knowing of it."

I will, however, return to this point when I come to consider what I have called the Realist alternative to the above position.

III.

It has been said above that practically all the theories which have been advanced as to the nature of our knowledge of sensible objects reduce themselves to one of the three main types of Representationalism, Idealism, or

Realism.

Subjective
Subjective

This may appear to be a somewhat extreme statement. I believe, however, that a very large proportion of modern Idealist theories exhibit on analysis the fundamental Representationalist or tertium quid attitude, that Representationalism dogs the footsteps of psychologists like Mr. Stout, and that the Pragmatical Bergsonian view of perception founded upon the new psychological view of sensation as a continuum which in William James' writings supersedes the psychological atomism of Hume and Berkeley is also tainted with Representationalism.

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