As to
myself, I think God has given me assurance enough of the existence
of things without me: since, by their different application, I can
produce in myself both pleasure and pain, which is one great
concernment of my present state. This is certain: the confidence
that our faculties do not herein deceive us, is the greatest assurance
we are capable of concerning the existence of material beings. For
we cannot act anything but by our faculties; nor talk of knowledge
itself, but by the help of those faculties which are fitted to
apprehend even what knowledge is.
But besides the assurance we have from our senses themselves, that
they do not err in the information they give us of the existence of
things without us, when they are affected by them, we are further
confirmed in this assurance by other concurrent reasons:-
4. I. Confirmed by concurrent reasons:- First, because we cannot
have ideas of sensation but by the inlet of the senses. It is plain
those perceptions are produced in us by exterior causes affecting
our senses: because those that want the organs of any sense, never can
have the ideas belonging to that sense produced in their minds. This
is too evident to be doubted: and therefore we cannot but be assured
that they come in by the organs of that sense, and no other way. The
organs themselves, it is plain, do not produce them: for then the eyes
of a man in the dark would produce colours, and his nose smell roses
in the winter: but we see nobody gets the relish of a pineapple,
till he goes to the Indies, where it is, and tastes it.
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