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Indeed! Were I either Romanist or Unitarian, I should desire no better than the admission of body having an 'esse' not in the 'percipi', and really subsisting, ([Greek: autò tò chraema]) as the supporter of its accidents. At all events, the Romanist, declaring the accidents to be those ordinarily impressed on the senses ([Greek: t
Quod quo magis intellegi posset, fingere animo iubebat tanta incitatum aliquem voluptate corporis, quanta percipi posset maxima: nemini censebat fore dubium quin tam diu, dum ita gauderet, nihil agitare mente, nihil ratione, nihil cogitatione consequi posset.
The difficult triumph over the sensuous imagination by which he attained the conception of intelligible objects was won only after long discipline and much reading of Platonising philosophers. Every reality seemed to him at first an object of sense: God, if he existed, must be perceptible, for to Saint Augustine's mind also, at this early and sensuous stage of its development, esse was percipi.
While the Esse of all objects is a percipi, a something perceived, which has come into knowledge, the Esse of the self is a percipere, a perceiving, a knowing, that is, the Self can only be thought of as self-knowing.
So says the Professor in so many words, and to precisely the same effect is the more diffuse language of the Bishop, where, speaking of 'all the choir of heaven and furniture of earth, of all the bodies which compose the mighty frame of the world, he declares that their esse is percipi, that their 'being' consists in their being 'perceived or known, and that unless they were actually perceived by, or existed in, some created or uncreate mind, they could not possibly exist at all.
The very words, objective and subjective, of such constant recurrence in the schools of yore, I have ventured to re-introduce, because I could not so briefly or conveniently by any more familiar terms distinguish the percipere from the percipi.
"Verum non posse comprehendi ex illâ Stoici Zenonis definitione arripuisse videbantur, qui ait id verum percipi posse, quod ita esset animo impressum ex eo unde esset, ut esse non posset ex eo unde non esset. Quod brevius planiusque sic dicitur, his signis verum posse comprehendi, quæ signa non potest habere quod falsum est." Augustin, contra Acad. ii. 5. See also Sext. Empir. adv.
What 'sustaining' means here is clear to any one who has lived through the experience, but to no one else; just as 'loud, 'red, 'sweet, mean something only to beings with ears, eyes, and tongues. The percipi in these originals of experience is the esse; the curtain is the picture.
They exist as they are perceived. But, leaving for the present, as far as relates to the material world, the materialists, hyloists, and antihyloists, to settle this point among them, which is indeed A subtle question, raised among Those out o' their wits, and those i' the wrong: for only we transcendentalists are in the right: we may very safely assert that the esse of happiness is percipi.
That ingenious and amiable prelate will tell them that "the objects of sense cannot exist otherwise than in a mind perceiving them;" that "their esse is percipi, nor is it possible that they should have any existence out of the minds, or thinking things, which perceive them;" and that "all the choir of heaven and the furniture of the earth, in a word, all those bodies which compose the mighty frame of the world, have not any subsistence without a mind."
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