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Updated: May 8, 2025
I shall give the name sensibilia to those objects which have the same metaphysical and physical status as sense-data, without necessarily being data to any mind.
It is this question, and not our previous question as to the difference between sense-data and the physical object, that must now concern us. Taking the word 'idea' in Berkeley's sense, there are two quite distinct things to be considered whenever an idea is before the mind.
Hume had been the first to discover that we are in the habit of trying to rationalize our sense-data by putting ideal constructions upon them, though he had abstained from sanctifying the practice by a hideous jargon of technical terminology. But this way of eking out the facts only seemed to him to falsify them.
Thus in regard to physical objects, for example, the principle that sense-data are signs of physical objects is itself a connexion of universals; and it is only in virtue of this principle that experience enables us to acquire knowledge concerning physical objects. The same applies to the law of causality, or, to descend to what is less general, to such principles as the law of gravitation.
But if it is merely a set of sense-data, it cannot have ever been in any place where I did not see it; thus we shall have to suppose that it did not exist at all while I was not looking, but suddenly sprang into being in a new place.
So far as our sense-data afford evidence as to the physical sun they afford evidence as to the physical sun of eight minutes ago; if the physical sun had ceased to exist within the last eight minutes, that would make no difference to the sense-data which we call 'seeing the sun'. This affords a fresh illustration of the necessity of distinguishing between sense-data and physical objects.
Thus we may lay down the following definition: Physical things are those series of appearances whose matter obeys the laws of physics. That such series exist is an empirical fact, which constitutes the verifiability of physics. It remains to ask how, in our system, we are to find a place for sense-data which apparently fail to have the usual connection with the world of physics.
But whether true or false, idealism is not to be dismissed as obviously absurd. We have seen that, even if physical objects do have an independent existence, they must differ very widely from sense-data, and can only have a correspondence with sense-data, in the same sort of way in which a catalogue has a correspondence with the things catalogued.
From what has been said it is evident that, both as regards intuitive knowledge and as regards derivative knowledge, if we assume that intuitive knowledge is trustworthy in proportion to the degree of its self-evidence, there will be a gradation in trustworthiness, from the existence of noteworthy sense-data and the simpler truths of logic and arithmetic, which may be taken as quite certain, down to judgements which seem only just more probable than their opposites.
It is plain that if we are to know anything about the table, it must be by means of the sense-data brown colour, oblong shape, smoothness, etc. which we associate with the table; but, for the reasons which have been given, we cannot say that the table is the sense-data, or even that the sense-data are directly properties of the table.
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