ABSTRACT
If it is plausible to agree with Reid that manifest color qualities, color as qualia, do not resemble colors as they are in themselves, it would nonetheless appear to be against common sense to hold the view that manifest color qualities are not spatially extended, or that they are not arranged in figured patterns. We can reject the view that the manifest qualities we immediately experience in vision are originally experienced as being located on the surface of objects at a distance from us, especially if we do not think that distance is an immediate object of sight. But it is difficult to dismiss the view that these manifest qualities are at least spatially extended and arranged in a two-dimensional field of vision. We can claim that these qualities are qualities of non-existent objects of perception (or non-existent qualities of such objects) and hence that vision is systematically deceptive in what it tells us about the external world, or we can claim that these manifest qualities are spatially located sensory states of an extended mind. But in whatever way we might seek to account for them while denying that they really are located outside of us on the surface of objects, one thing that is just too obvious to common sense to deny is that manifest color qualities are spatially located relative to one another and so compose color patches of various sizes and shapes.2 Apparently, this is what Reid thought: manifest color qualities are sensations or ways of feeling that are not spread out in patches and their order of coexistence is not spatial. While we are allowed to say that a particular color is spread out on a canvas by a painter, we are not allowed to say that the sensations it occasions are spread out in a corresponding twodimensional array existing in the mind of the painter. In a similar manner, while we are allowed to say that a red object we are looking at is located to the left of a green one, we are not allowed to say that a sensation of red is located to the left of a sensation of green. This view is just a consequence of Reid’s general claim that sensations do not resemble the qualities of bodies-a thesis that he was willing to extend to the point of saying that the order of sensations does not resemble the spatial order of the qualities that occasion these sensations. To argue otherwise would be tantamount to falling back into what he called ‘the way of ideas,’ the copy-theory of perception that he saw as the harbinger of skepticism about the external world. Reid rather thought that we know the qualities of bodies directly through acts of perception. Acts of perception are different from sensations: while sensations are acts of mind that have only themselves as objects (if they have any object at all), acts of perceptions are acts of mind that are directed to objects distinct from themselves, the qualities of bodies. In the perception of a primary quality, a sensation is regularly followed by the conception and belief of an object whose qualities are manifest (qualities such as extension, figure, size, rest or motion, solidity, hardness or softness, roughness or smoothness). In the perception of a secondary quality, a sensation is merely followed by the conception of an unknown cause of the sensation itself. As Reid says, secondary qualities are in this sense ‘occult.’
