Thomas Beddoes to Erasmus Darwin, [February/March 1794]
My dear Sir,
Berkeley, I can assure you, asserts that certain words do not excite ideas, either in the introduction or body of his Treatise on Matter. I hold it only in this sense, that some sounds excite emotions and passions without the intervention of any ideas, as the political cry of ‘the church is in danger;’ and Virgil’s Spargere voces in vulgum ambiguas, is another instance. I think that Virtue, Wisdom, ought to be classed apart from the words man, horse; the latter having fixed to them certain motions of the immediate organs of sense, the other by no means so; for do not Wisdom and Virtue suggest the ideas of quite different practices and habits to different persons, according as they are superstitious, avaricious, or not? That they do suggest sensual motions, though not the same, to both, is undeniable; but on account of the variableness of this suggestion, they should be distinguished from words exciting definite sensual motions in all who understand the language. And Hartley’s division—1. into words having ideas and no definitions; and 2. into words having definitions and no ideas, seems to me not much amiss. By the first one may understand such as are explicable by the exhibition of an object, and by the second such as are not, as Wisdom; to explain which you must exhibit many objects or use many words, exciting successions of sensual motions.
I have conversed with Mr Keir and Sir B. Boothby, on your opinion of ideas resembling objects, and both as yet think with me. Neither could see any fallacy in this argument. When two objects excite similar ideas, we judge them alike; so the sensual motion is the medium of comparison. But what medium of comparison have we in the case of sensual motions and objects exciting them? When I dip my finger into water, and again into sand, different sensual motions take place; but in neither case can I see how these motions resemble a liquid body or an incoherent mass; so also when I rub sand or water between a finger and thumb. When a salient angle makes an indentation on the skin, the rete mucosum makes a salient angle towards the internal parts, but so far it is only passive; and how its fibres move is mere matter of conjecture. If analogy is worth attention, may we not ask, since there seems no resemblance between a point, electricity or an acid applied to a muscle, and its figure when in motion, why should there be any likeness between the stimulus and motion produced in other fibrous motions? In neither of the letters I wrote was there any thing important. One contained a quotation from a very ingenious thesis which you might have thought curious if the idea was not borrowed from Hartley. The other mentioned a visit from the Dutchess of Devonshire, who has made me two. We talked of you. She, I understand, had been taught that you are very ingenious, but very whimsical as a Physician and Philosopher. Dull people are very fond of persuading others that the ingenious want judgment. I begged the Dutchess to believe, provisionally, that you reasoned full as well as you wrote verses. She said she should expect your book with great impatience. Had I known twelve months ago that Zoonomia was to be published so soon, I would have gone to London instead of Bristol and given lectures on your system.
I am, dear Sir,
Your sincere and obliged,
Thomas Beddoes
Published: Stock, Appendix 6, p, xlii–iii