How Do We Know We Exist?
Table of Contents
Is the Perception of Existence from Our Senses, Reason, or Imagination?
We can ask: Why do we believe in the body’s existence?
But it is in vain to ask: Is there a body or not?
These 2 questions ask about the continued and distinct existence of body, and are intimately connected together:
- Why do we think that objects still exist if we are not looking at them?
- Why do we suppose them to have an existence distinct from our mind and perception?
If the objects continue to exist even when we do not see them, it means that their existence does not require our perception.
Which one creates the idea of a continued or a distinct existence:
- the senses,
- the reason, or
- the imagination?
The Senses Cannot Give Us an Idea of Existence
The senses can only validate the existence of things they sense.
Therefore, the senses create the opinion of a distinct existence, and not a continued existence.
Our senses convey to us only a single perception, and nothing beyond that.
A single perception can only produce the idea of a double existence through some inference either of the reason or imagination.
When the mind looks further than what immediately appears to it, its conclusions can never come from the senses.
The mind looks further, when from a single perception it:
- infers a double existence, and
- supposes a resemblance and causation between them.
Therefore, if our senses suggest any idea of distinct existences, they must convey the impressions as those very existences, by a kind of fallacy and illusion.
All sensations are felt by the mind as they are.
When we doubt whether they present themselves as distinct objects, or as mere impressions, the difficulty is not on their nature.
The difficulty is on their relations and situation.
If the senses presented our impressions as external to, and independent of ourselves, both the objects and ourselves must be obvious to our senses.
Otherwise, the senses could not compare them.
The difficulty then, is how far we ourselves are the objects of our senses.
The most abstruse question in philosophy is the one on:
- identity, and
- the nature of the uniting principle which constitutes a person.
We must have recourse to the most profound metaphysics to answer it because our senses are unable to answer it.
In common life, these ideas of ‘self’ and ‘person’ are never very fixed nor determinate.
Therefore, it is absurd to imagine that the senses can ever distinguish between ourselves and external objects.
In addition, every external and internal impression, passions, affections, sensations, pains and pleasures, are originally on the same footing.
These are all impressions or perceptions.
Our senses cannot deceive us more in the external locations and internal relations, than in the nature of our impressions because all the actions and sensations of the mind are known to us by consciousness.
All those actions and sensations of the mind:
- must appear as they are, and
- must be what they appear.
Everything that enters the mind is in reality a perception.
It is impossible for anything to appear to the mind in a different way that it appears to the feeling.
It would imply that we can have an idea of a feeling that we did not feel.