Their 'qualities' are what they act by, and are what we act
on; and these also exist. These lamps shed their quality of light on
every object in this room. We intercept IT on its way whenever we
hold up an opaque screen. It is the very sound that my lips emit
that travels into your ears. It is the sensible heat of the fire
that migrates into the water in which we boil an egg; and we can
change the heat into coolness by dropping in a lump of ice. At this
stage of philosophy all non-European men without exception have
remained. It suffices for all the necessary practical ends of life;
and, among our own race even, it is only the highly sophisticated
specimens, the minds debauched by learning, as Berkeley calls them,
who have ever even suspected common sense of not being absolutely
true.
But when we look back, and speculate as to how the common-sense
categories may have achieved their wonderful supremacy, no reason
appears why it may not have been by a process just like that by
which the conceptions due to Democritus, Berkeley, or Darwin,
achieved their similar triumphs in more recent times. In other
words, they may have been successfully DISCOVERED by prehistoric
geniuses whose names the night of antiquity has covered up; they may
have been verified by the immediate facts of experience which they
first fitted; and then from fact to fact and from man to man they
may have SPREAD, until all language rested on them and we are now
incapable of thinking naturally in any other terms.
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