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Loading... The new astronomyby S. P. Langley
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: TIT. THE SUN'S ENERGY. TT is indeed, says good Bishop Berkeley, an opinion J- strangely prevailing amongst men that . . . all sensible objects have an existence . . . distinct from their being perceived by the understanding. But . . . some truths there are, so near and obvious to the mind, that a man need only open his eyes to see them. Such I take this important one to be, namely, that all the choir of heaven and furniture of the earth ? in a word, all those bodies which compose the mighty frame of the world ? have not any subsistence without a mind. We are not going to take the reader along the high priori road of metaphysics, but only to speak of certain accepted conclusions of modern experimental physics, which do not themselves, indeed, justify all of Berkeley's language, but to which these words of the author of A New Theory of Vision seem to be a not unfit prelude. When we see a rose-leaf, we see with it what we call a color, and we are apt to think it is in the rose. But the color is in us, for it is a sensation which something coming from the sun excites in the eye; so that if the rose-leaf were still there, there would be no color unless there were an eye to receive and a brain to interpret the sensation. Every color that is lovely in the rainbow or the flower, every hue that is vivid in a ribbon or sombre in the grave harmonies of some old Persian rug, the metallic lustre of the humming-bird or the sober imperial yellowof precious china, ? all these have no existence as color apart from the seeing eye, and all have their fount and origin in the sun itself. Color and light, then, are not, properly speaking, external things, but names given to the sensations caused by an uncomprehended something radiated from the sun, when this falls on o... No library descriptions found. |
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