The Ways of Apprehending Categories and Qualities

Abstract

All our experience of external things is provoked in us through the organs of sense, and since we have no enjoyment of ourselves which is not the contemplation of a non-mental object, all our experience whether enjoyed or contemplated is provoked through the sense-organs. The most complicated objects or enjoyments are resoluble into elements of sense, or its derivative idea, and their groupings in some empirical plan, and from beginning to end these experiences are qualified by categorial as well as empirical features. Moreover, not only do our categorial experiences come to us through the medium of sense, but those senses are the organs for the secondary qualities of matter. I speak at present of the special senses and not the organic and kinaesthetic ones. We do not see or feel or otherwise experience Space or Time except through vision or touch or some other apprehension of secondary qualities. The primary qualities which are empirical differentiations of Space and Time never reach our minds, as Berkeley saw, except along with secondary ones.