Speculations on Metaphysics - Page 2

disagreement consists in the variety and irregularity of
the occasions on which they arise in the mind. That in which they
agree, to that in which they differ, is as everything to nothing.
Important distinctions, of various degrees of force, indeed, are to
be established between them, if they were, as they may be, subjects
of ethical and economical discussion; but that is a question
altogether distinct. By considering all knowledge as bounded by
perception, whose operations may be indefinitely combined, we arrive
at a conception of Nature inexpressibly more magnificent, simple
and true, than accords with the ordinary systems of complicated and
partial consideration. Nor does a contemplation of the universe,
in this comprehensive and synthetical view, exclude the subtlest
analysis of its modifications and parts.

A scale might be formed, graduated according to the degrees
of a combined ratio of intensity, duration, connexion, periods of
recurrence, and utility, which would be the standard, according to
which all ideas might be measured, and an uninterrupted chain of
nicely shadowed distinctions would be observed, from the faintest
impression on the senses, to the most distinct combination of those
impressions; from the simplest of those combinations, to that mass
of knowledge which, including our own nature, constitutes what we
call the universe.

We are intuitively conscious of our own existence, and of that
connexion in the train of our successive ideas, which we term our
identity. We are conscious also of the existence of other minds;
but not intuitively. Our evidence, with respect to the existence of
other minds, is founded upon a very complicated relation of ideas,
which it is foreign to the purpose of this treatise to anatomize.
The basis of this relation is, undoubtedly, a periodical recurrence
of masses of ideas, which our voluntary determinations have, in
one peculiar direction, no power to circumscribe or to arrest, and
against the recurrence of which they can only imperfectly provide.
The irresistible laws of thought constrain us to believe that the
precise limits of our actual ideas are not the actual limits of
possible ideas; the law, according to which these deductions are
drawn, is called analogy; and this is the foundation of all our
inferences, from one idea to another, inasmuch as they resemble
each other.

We see trees, houses, fields, living beings in our own shape, and
in shapes more or less analogous to our own. These are perpetually
changing the mode of their existence relatively to us. To express
the varieties of these modes, we say, WE MOVE, THEY MOVE; and as this
motion is continual, though not uniform, we express our conception
of the diversities of its