Physical Metempiric
by Alfred Barratt (9780217028028)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER IV. THINGS-IN-THEMSELVES. The hypothesis of Eealism that Things exist not only as phenomena in us, but also in themselves, though we have come to see how it is really connected with the hypothesis of Other Consciousness, does not in the ordinary course of things spring from the same origin. It is naturally suggested, not by the development or extension of the idea of Self, but by the discovery of a Not-Self; not by the peculiar connexion of consciousness with the body, which seems to be its organ and to a great extent under its control, but rather by the perception of external objects over which our will has no control, and which seem to produce in us sensations as to which our will is powerless: this, together with the permanence of these objects and their independence of our movements, produces the instinctive feeling that there must be in these external objects, in order to produce their unity and stability, something which we feel is not in us, some Not-Self to hold together their multiform qualities into definite Things and to impress them on the Self; and this supposition is strongly reinforced when, on the adoption of the primary Metempirical assumption of Other Minds, we find that Things are not only persistent to our own consciousness, but have identical values (allowing for difference of spatial and other relations) to all individual minds. This leads to the idea of one object existing in itself in a definite part of space and producing phenomena in different minds. When men try to define the nature of this noumenal object as distinct from its phenomena in themselves, they look upon, this external absolute something, this Not-Self, which they often call Substance or Matter, as that of which the different phenomena or properties of the object are different ...

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