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"Our sensations would be no better than the fleeting pictures of a moving object on a camera obscura, which leave not the least vestige behind them."

— Campbell, George (1719-1796)

Author

The Philosophy of Rhetoric

Place of Publication

London

Publisher

Printed for W. Strahan and T. Cadell

Date

1776

Metaphor

"Our sensations would be no better than the fleeting pictures of a moving object on a camera obscura, which leave not the least vestige behind them."

Metaphor in Context

I should now consider the principal tribes comprehended under the general name of moral evidence; but, that every difficulty may be removed, which might retard our progress in the proposed discussion, it will be necessary, in the first place, to explore more accurately those sources in our nature, which give being to experience, and consequently to all those attainments, moral and intellectual, that are derived from it. These sources are two, sense and memory. The senses, both external and internal, are the original inlets of perception. They inform the mind of the facts which, in the present instant, are situated within the sphere of their activity, and no sooner discharge their office in any particular instance, than the articles of information exhibited by them, are devolved on the memory. Remembrance instantly succeeds sensation, insomuch that the memory becomes the sole repository of the knowledge received from sense; knowledge which, without this repository, would be as instantaneously lost as it is gotten, and could be of no service to the mind. Our sensations would be no better than the fleeting pictures of a moving object on a camera obscura, which leave not the least vestige behind them. Memory therefore is the only original voucher extant, of those past realities for which we had once the evidence of sense. Her ideas are, as it were, the prints that have been left by sensible impressions. But from these two faculties, considered in themselves, there results to us the knowledge only of individual facts, and only of such facts as either heretofore have come, or at present do come, under the notice of our senses.
(I, pp. 129-130)