ABSTRACT
The variety of sensations of color iswhat allows us to perceive different colors at the same time. Stewart does not seem to have thought that sensations themselves, when we carefully reflect upon them, appear to be ordered in space, although, as we have seen, he admitted thatwe have a confused notion of themas spread over bodies. Rather, his view seems to have been that the variety of sensations constitutes a pattern of resemblances and differences in these mental items that has some kind of isomorphism or one-to-one correspondence with visible figure itself. The analogy with language seems to have driven his thought on this score.28 Although letters and their various combinations in words do not resemble the objects they stand for, the words that result from letters’ combinations can bemapped, as in a dictionary, on to objects and events in the world. Perhaps this is the connection ‘established by nature,’ more fundamental than just a simple constant conjunction, that Stewart saw between the perception of visible figure and sensations of color.29
