10.  Visual ideas, therefore, constitute a kind of language, by which we are informed of the tactile ideas which will, or may, arise in us.

Taking these propositions into consideration seriatim, it may be assumed that everyone will assent to the first and second; and that for the third and fourth we have only to include the muscular sense tinder the name of sense of touch, as Berkeley did, in order to make it quite accurate.  Nor is it intelligible to me that anyone should explicitly deny the truth of the fifth proposition, though some of Berkeley’s supporters, less careful than himself, have done so.  Indeed, it must be confessed that it is only grudgingly, and as it were against his will, that Berkeley admits that we obtain ideas of extension, figure, and magnitude by pure vision, and that he more than half retracts the admission; while he absolutely denies that sight gives us any notion of outness in either sense of the word, and even declares that “no proper visual idea appears to be without the mind, or at any distance off.”  By “proper visual ideas,” Berkeley denotes colours, and light, and shade; and, therefore, he affirms that colours do not appear to be at any distance from us.  I confess that this assertion appears to me to be utterly unaccountable.  I have made endless experiments on this point, and by no effort of the imagination can I persuade myself, when looking at a colour, that the colour is in my mind, and not at a “distance off,” though of course I know perfectly well, as a matter of reason, that colour is subjective.  It is like looking at the sun setting, and trying to persuade oneself that the earth appears to move and not the sun, a feat I have never been able to accomplish.  Even when the eyes are shut, the darkness of which one is conscious, carries with it the notion of outness.  One looks, so to speak, into a dark space.  Common language expresses the common experience of mankind in this matter.  A man will say that a smell is in his nose, a taste in his mouth, a singing in his ears, a creeping or a warmth in his skin; but if he is jaundiced, he does not say that he has yellow in his eyes, but that everything looks yellow; and if he is troubled with muscae volitantes, he says, not that he has specks in his eyes, but that he sees specks dancing before his eyes.  In fact, it appears to me that it is the special peculiarity of visual sensations, that they invariably give rise to the idea of remoteness, and that Berkeley’s dictum ought to be reversed.  For I think that anyone who interrogates his consciousness carefully will find that “every proper visual idea” appears to be without the mind and at a distance off.

Not only does every visibile appear to be remote, but it has a position in external space, just as a tangibile appears to be superficial and to have a determinate position on the surface of the body.  Every visibile, in fact, appears (approximately) to be situated upon a line drawn from it to the point of the retina on which its image falls.  It is referred outwards, in the general direction of the pencil of light by which it is rendered visible, just as, in the experiment with the stick, the tangibile is referred outwards to the end of the stick.