Page "Empiricism" Paragraph 27

Most of Hume's followers have disagreed with his conclusion that belief in an external world is rationally unjustifiable, contending that Hume's own principles implicitly contained the rational justification for such a belief, that is, beyond being content to let the issue rest on human instinct, custom and habit.

According to an extreme empiricist theory known as Phenomenalism, anticipated by the arguments of both Hume and George Berkeley, a physical object is a kind of construction out of our experiences.

Phenomenalism is the view that physical objects, properties, events ( whatever is physical ) are reducible to mental objects, properties, events.

Ultimately, only mental objects, properties, events, exist — hence the closely related term subjective idealism.

By the phenomenalistic line of thinking, to have a visual experience of a real physical thing is to have an experience of a certain kind of group of experiences.

This type of set of experiences possesses a constancy and coherence that is lacking in the set of experiences of which hallucinations, for example, are a part.

As John Stuart Mill put it in the mid-19th century, matter is the " permanent possibility of sensation ".