Thus, thought is existence.  More than that, so far as we are concerned, existence is thought, all our conceptions of existence being some kind or other of thought.  Do not for a moment suppose that these are mere paradoxes or subtleties.  A little reflection upon the commonest facts proves them to be irrefragable truths.  For example, I take up a marble, and I find it to be a red, round, hard, single body.  We call the redness, the roundness, the hardness, and the singleness, “qualities” of the marble; and it sounds, at first, the height of absurdity to say that all these qualities are modes of our own consciousness, which cannot even be conceived to exist in the marble.  But consider the redness, to begin with.  How does the sensation of redness arise?  The waves of a certain very attenuated matter, the particles of which are vibrating with vast rapidity, but with very different velocities, strike upon the marble, and those which vibrate with one particular velocity are thrown off from its surface in all directions.  The optical apparatus of the eye gathers some of these together, and gives them such a course that they impinge upon the surface of the retina, which is a singularly delicate apparatus, connected with the termination of the fibres of the optic nerve.  The impulses of the attenuated matter, or ether, affect this apparatus and the fibres of the optic nerve in a certain way; and the change in the fibres of the optic nerve produces yet other changes in the brain; and these, in some fashion unknown to us, give rise to the feeling, or consciousness, of redness.  If the marble could remain unchanged, and either the rate of vibration of the ether, or the nature of the retina, could be altered, the marble would seem not red, but some other colour.  There are many people who are what are called colourblind, being unable to distinguish one colour from another.  Such an one might declare our marble to be green; and he would be quite as right in saying that it is green, as we are in declaring it to be red.  But then, as the marble cannot, in itself, be both green and red, at the same time, this shows that the quality “redness” must be in our consciousness and not in the marble.

In like manner, it is easy to see that the roundness and the hardness are forms of our consciousness, belonging to the groups which we call sensations of sight and touch.  If the surface of the cornea were cylindrical, we should have a very different notion of a round body from that which we possess now; and if the strength of the fabric, and the force of the muscles, of the body were increased a hundredfold, our marble would seem to be as soft as a pellet of bread crumbs.