Elements of the philosophy of the human mind. By Dugald Stewart. Rev. and abridged, with critical and explanatory notes, for the use of colleges and schools. By Francis Bowen ...

ABSTRACTION. 99
"We are at a loss to know," says this excellent philosopher,
"6how we perceive distant objects; how we remember things
past; how we imagine things that have no existence. Ideas in
the mind seem to account for all these operations; they are all
by the means of ideas reduced to one operation; to a kind of
feeling, or immediate perception of things, present, and in contact with the percipient; and feeling is an operation so familiar,
that we think it needs no explanation, but may serve to explain
other operations.
"But this feeling, or immediate perception, is as difficult to
be comprehended, as the things which we pretend to explain by
it. Two things may be in contact, without any feeling of perception; there must, therefore, be in the percipient, a power to
feel, or to perceive. How this power is produced, and how it
operates, is quite beyond the reach of our knowledge. As little
can we know, whether this power must be limited to things
present, and in contact with us. Neither can any man pretend
to prove, that the Being who gave us the power to perceive
"In popular language, idea signifies the same thing as conception, apprehension, notion. To have an idea of any thing, is to conceive it. To
have a distinct idea, is to conceive it distinctly. To have no idea of it, is
not to conceive it at all. When the word idea is taken in this popular
sense, no man can possibly doubt whether he has ideas.
"According to the philosophical meaning of the word idea, it does not
signify that act of the mind which we call thought, or conception, but some
object of thought. Of these objects of thought called ideas, different sects
of philosophers have given very different accounts.
" Some have held them to be self-existent; others, to be in the divine
mind; others, in our own minds; and others, in the brain, or sensorium."
-p. 213.
I don't know of any author who, prior to Dr. Reid, has expressed himself on this subject with so much justness and precision as Father Buffier,
in the following passage of his Treatise on First Truths.
"If we confine ourselves to what is intelligible in our observations on
Ideas, we will say, they are nothing but mere modifications of the mind as
a thinking being. They are called ideas with regard to the object represented; and perception, with regard to the faculty representing. It is manifest that our ideas, considered in this sense, are not more distinguished
from our understanding than motion is from a body moved."