Chapter XII: Part 12

It must not be conceived, however, that, in dividing the class of internal affections of the mind, into the two distinct orders of intellectual states, and emotions; and, in speaking of our emotions as subsequent in their origin, I wish to be understood, that these never are combined, at the same moment, in that sense of combination, as applied to the mind, which I have already explained too frequently, to need again to define and illustrate it. On the contrary, they very frequently concur; but, in all cases in which they do concur, it is easy for us to distinguish them by reflective analysis. The emotion of _pity_, for example, may continue in the mind, while we are _intellectually_ planning means of relief, for the sufferers who occasioned it; but, though the pity and the reasoning _co-exist_, we have little difficulty in separating them in our reflection. It is the same with all our vivid desires, which not merely lead to action, but accompany it. The sage, who in the silence of midnight, continues still those labours which the morning began, watching, with sleepless eye, the fate of some experiment, that almost promises to place within his hand the invisible thread, which leads into the labyrinths of nature, or exploring those secrets of the mind itself, by the aid of which he is afterwards to lay down rules of more accurate philosophizing, and to become the legislator of all who think, is not cheered, in his toils, merely by occasional anticipations of the truths that await his search. The pleasure of future discovery is, as it were, a constant light, that shines upon him and warms him; and, in the very moments in which he watches, and calculates, and arranges, there are other principles of his nature, in as lively exercise as his powers of observation and reasoning. The warrior, at the head of an army, which he has often led from victory to victory, and which he is leading again to new fields of conflict, does not think of glory only in the intervals of meditation or action. The passion which he obeys, is not a mere inspiring genius, that occasionally descends to rouse or invigorate. It is the _soul_ of his continued existence,--it marches with him, from station to station,--it deliberates with him in his tent,--it conquers with him in the field,--it thinks of new successes, in the very moment of vanquishing; and, even at night, when his body has yielded at last to the influence of that fatigue, of which it was scarcely conscious, while there was room for any new exertion by which fatigue could be increased, and when all the anxieties of military command are slumbering with it, the passion that animates him, more active still, does not quit him as he rests, but is wakeful in his very sleep, bringing before him dreams, that almost renew the tumults and the toils of the day. Our emotions, then, may _co-exist_ with various sensations, remembrances, reasonings,--in the same manner as these feelings, sensitive or intellectual, may variously co-exist with each other. But we do not think it less necessary to class our sensations of vision as different from our sensations of smell, and our comparison, as itself different from the separate sensations compared, because we may, at the same moment, both see and smell a rose, and may endeavour to appreciate the relative amount of pleasure which that beautiful flower thus doubly affords. In like manner, our intellectual states of mind, and our emotions, are not the less to be considered as distinct classes, because any vivid passion may continue to exist together with those intellectual processes of thought, which it originally prompted, and which, after prompting, it prolongs.

In all these cases, however, in which an emotion _co-exists_ with the results of other external or internal influences, it is still easy to distinguish its subsequence to the feelings that preceded it. Pity, for example, as in the case to which I have before alluded, may co-exist with a long train of thoughts, that are busily occupied in endeavouring to relieve most effectually the misery which is pitied; but the misery must have been itself an object of our thought, before the state of mind which constitutes pity, could have been induced. The emotion which we feel, on the contemplation of beauty, may continue to co-exist with our mere perception of the forms and colours of bodies; but these forms and colours must have been perceived by us, before the delightful emotion could have been originally felt. In short, our emotions, though like the warmth and radiance, which seem to accompany the very presence of the sun, rather than to flow from it--they may seem in many cases to be a part of the very feelings which excite them, are yet, in every instance, as truly secondary to these feelings, as the light which beams on us, on the surface of our earth, is subsequent to the rising of the great orb of day.

As yet, we have advanced but a short way, in our generalization of the mental phenomena: though, as far as we have advanced, our division seems sufficiently distinct and comprehensive. The mind is susceptible of certain existing affections, of certain intellectual modifications which arise from these, and of certain emotions which arise from both; that is to say, it is capable of existing in certain states, the varieties of which correspond with these particular designations. We see, we remember, or compare, what we have seen, regard what we see, or remember, or compare, with desire or with aversion; and of these, or of states analogous to these, the whole of life, sensitive, intellectual, or moral, is composed. Every minute, therefore, of every hour, in all its variety of occupation, is but a portion of this complicated tissue. Let us suppose ourselves, for example, looking down from an eminence, on the prospect beneath.--On one side all is desolation,--and we see perhaps, at a little distance, some half-roofless hovel, as miserable, as the waste immediately around it, which has scarcely the appearance of a dwelling for any living thing, but seems rather, as if Nature herself had originally placed it there, as a part of the general sterility and ruggedness. On the other side, all is plenty and magnificence;--and we see, amid lawns and wooded banks, a mansion as different in aspect, as if the beings that inhabited it were of a different race,--which, as a part of the scene, where it is placed, accords so harmoniously with the whole, that, without it, the scene itself would appear incomplete, and almost incongruous, as if stripped of some essential charm. To view these separate dwellings, and all the objects around them--if no other feeling arose--would be to have a series of external or sensitive affections only. But it is scarcely possible for us to view them, without the instant rise of those intellectual states of mind which constitute comparison, and of those affections of another order, which constitute the emotions of admiration and desire in the one case, and in the other the emotions that are opposite to admiration and desire, together perhaps with some of those bitter emotions which the sight of misery makes in every breast that is not unworthy of so sacred an influence.

In this example, our intellectual states of mind, and our emotions, have for their objects things really existing without; but the external affections of our senses, though the most permanent, and usually the most vivid, and therefore the best remembered, of all the sources of our internal feelings are far from being necessary, in every instance, to the production of these. There is a constant, or almost constant succession of internal affections of mind, of thoughts, and emotions, following thoughts and emotions, which even though we were to be rendered incapable of a single new sensation,--if our animal life could in these circumstances be long protracted,--would still preserve to us also that _intellectual_ and _moral_ existence, which is the only life, that is worthy of the name. The knowledge which we acquire from _without_, lives in us _within_; and, in such a case as that which I have now imagined, our memory would be to us in some measure every sense, which we had lost, creating to us again that very world which had vanished before us. If we could compare and love or hate only things actually present, we should be far from the maturity and perfection of an infant's mind, and should scarcely be advanced to the rank of idiocy, which limited as it is in its range, still comprehends in its little sphere of foresight and memory, some few moments at least of the past, and even a moment or two of the future. It is with the future and with the past, that, intellectually and morally, we are chiefly conversant. To these high capacities of our being, the subjects, which can exercise our powers and feelings, however distant in time or place, are as it were _everlastingly present_,--like that mysterious eternal _now_, of which theologians speak,--in which past, present, and future are considered, as, in every moment of every age, alike visible to the omniscient glance of the Divinity. We love the virtues, of which we read, with the same sort of emotion, with which we love the virtues that are mingling with us in the present hour. The patriot of the most remote age,--of whom we know nothing, but the historical tale, of his voluntary perils or sufferings, in some generous cause,--is like the friend of our familiar intercourse; and the sacrifices, that wrought the happiness of millions of beings, who are now not merely _unknown_ to us, but of whom not a single name is remembered on the earth, awake a sort of veneration, that is almost combined with gratitude, as if we were in the presence of a personal deliverer. It is the same with absolute _unreality_, nor merely with that which no longer exists, but with that which never had existence. We are struck with the beauty of what we only imagine, in the same manner, though perhaps not with the same liveliness of feeling, as we are struck with the beauty of external things. Our emotions then, however dependent they may have been originally, are _now_ no longer dependent, on these external things. They may arise, from memory or imagination, as readily as from perception; but when they arise from memory or imagination, they are as truly distinguishable from what we remember and imagine, as they are distinguishable from our perceptions of mere forms and colours and other sensible qualities, when they arise from what we perceive.

To have arranged all the varieties of feelings of which the mind is susceptible, in the three great divisions to which our arrangement as yet has extended,--though it is unquestionably to have made some advance in our generalization,--is yet to have made only a small part of the necessary progress; since each of these three orders comprehends almost innumerable phenomena, which require the aid of more minute division. In the class of our external affections, indeed, this subdivision is very simple and easy; since our separate organs of sense furnish, of themselves, a very evident ground of distinction. But the two orders of our internal affections have no such obvious and tangible distinction, to serve as the basis of their subdivisions. They admit, however,--as I trust we shall find,--of distinctions, which, though not equally _obvious_, are almost equally definite, and require only a very little reflection, to be understood as clearly, as the organic relations, according to which we distinguish our sensations of sound, or smell, or sight. It is not my intention, however, to proceed, at present, to the consideration of these subdivisions; since the nature of the more minute arrangement will, I conceive, be better understood, when we come to treat of each separate order fully, than they could be now, by the mere enumeration of a few names, of the propriety of which, as mere names, and, still more of the propriety of the arrangement which they involve, you could not be expected to form any accurate judgment, without a fuller elucidation.

All which I must request you, then, at present, to keep in remembrance, is the _primary_ division, which we have made, of the different states of the mind into two great classes, and the _secondary_ division which we have made of _one_ of these classes, into its two very comprehensive orders.--You will remember, then, that the various affections, of which the mind is susceptible, are either _external_, as they arise from causes without the mind, or _internal_, as they arise from previous states, of the mind itself;--that of these internal affections, some are mere conceptions or notions of former feelings, or of objects and of the qualities or relations of objects, as remembered or variously combined or compared,--results of different susceptibilities of our intellectual constitution, to which different names have been given, conception, memory, imagination, abstraction, reason, and other synonymous terms;--that these internal affections or states of the mind, which I have denominated its intellectual states, are distinctly separable, in our reflective analysis, from certain vivid feelings, that may arise instantly in the mind, on the consideration of these mere intellectual results, or on the perception of objects without,--feelings of admiration, love, desire, and various other analogous, or opposite states of the mind;--but that there is such an order of vivid feelings, which arise, in many cases, on the mere consideration of what we perceive or remember, or imagine, or compare, and that this order is what I wish to be distinguished by the name of _emotions_.

According to this division, therefore, of the mental phenomena, into those which are of external and those which are of internal origin, and the subdivision which we have made of this latter class, I shall proceed to consider, first, The external powers or susceptibilities of the mind; 2dly, The intellectual powers or susceptibilities of the mind; and, 3dly, Its susceptibilities of emotion,--beginning with that class, which we have every reason to suppose to be first, in the actual order of developement,--the powers or susceptibilities of the mind, in its immediate relation to its own bodily organs.

Certain states of our bodily organs are directly followed by certain states or affections of our mind;--certain states or affections of our mind are directly followed by certain states of our bodily organs. The nerve of sight, for example, is affected in a certain manner; vision, which is an affection or state of the mind, is its consequence. I will to move my hand; the hand obeys my will, so rapidly, that the motion, though truly subsequent, seems almost to accompany my volition, rather than to follow it. In conformity with the definitions before given of power and susceptibility, the one as implying a reference to something consequent, the other a reference to something antecedent, I should be inclined to consider the sensation which follows the presence of an external object as indicating a mental susceptibility of being so affected;--the production of muscular motion by the will, as indicating a mental power. But the terms are of less consequence, if you understand fully the distinction that is implied in them; and you may be allowed still, in compliance with the general language, to speak of the power or faculty of sensation or perception, if you mean nothing more, as often as you use these terms, than that the mind is affected in a certain manner, and, therefore, must have had a previous susceptibility of being thus affected whenever certain changes have previously taken place, in that nervous system, with which it is connected.

In considering the susceptibilities of the mind, I comprehend, under its _external_ affections, all those phenomena or states of the mind, which are commonly termed _sensations_; together with all our internal organic feelings of pleasure or pain, that arise from states of the nervous system, as much as our other sensations. Many of these are commonly ranked under another head, that of _appetites_,--such as hunger, thirst, the desire of repose, or of change of muscular position, which arises from long-continued exertion; the oppressive anxiety, which arises from impeded respiration, and various other diseases, arising from bodily uneasiness. But these appetites evidently admit of being analysed into two distinct elements,--a pain of a peculiar species, and a subsequent desire of that which is to relieve the pain,--states of mind, of which one may immediately succeed the other; but which are, unquestionably, as different in themselves, as if no such succession took place,--as different as the pleasure of music is from the mere desire of enjoying it again, or as the pain of excessive heat, in burning, from the subsequent desire of coolness. The pain, which is _one_ element of the appetite, is an _external_ affection of the mind, to be classed with our other sensations,--the succeeding desire, which is another element of it, is an _internal_ affection of the mind, to be classed with our other emotions of desire. We might have felt the same pain of hunger, though we had not been aware, that it arose from want of food, and consequently could not have felt any desire of food, but merely the general desire of relief which attends every disagreeable sensation. We might have felt the same uneasiness, which we term thirst, though we had not been aware, that it would be relieved by a draught of any beverage,--and the same pain of impeded respiration or fatigue, though nature had not led us instinctively, in the one case to perform the muscular actions necessary for expiration and inspiration; in the other, to change our posture, and thus give repose to the wearied limbs. Whatever be the organic states, which occasion these painful feelings, that are elementary in our appetites, there can be no doubt, that some organic affections precede them, as truly as some affection of an external organ precedes the pain of a burn, or the painful temporary blindness, when we are dazzled with excessive light. And though, in the case of the appetite, we may give the same name to the pain, and to the desire of that which is to relieve the pain; or rather, may give one name to the combination of the two feelings,--which is not to be wondered at, where the two feelings are so universally and so immediately successive,--this error, or rather this mere abbreviation of language, is no reason that we should consider the elementary pain itself, as different, in kind, from our other pains, that have not merely half a term to express them, but a whole undivided word of their own. The pain, of which the appetite desires the relief, is a _sensation_, as much as any other internal bodily pain which we feel,--a state or affection of the mind, arising, immediately and solely, from a state or affection of the body,--which is the only definition that can be given of a _sensation_.

The pain of hunger and thirst, then, and, in general, every internal pain arising from a state of the bodily organs,--and distinct from the subsequent desires which they occasion,--are as truly _sensations_, as any other sensations; and the desires that follow these particular sensations, are as truly _desires_, as any other desires of which we have the consciousness. We may, indeed, if we resolve to invent a new name, for those particular desires, that terminate immediately in the relief of bodily pain, or the production of bodily pleasure, give to such desires the name of _appetites_; but it is surely a very simple analysis only, that is necessary to separate, from the desire of relief, the feeling of the pain which we wish to be relieved; since it is very evident, that the pain _must_ have existed primarily _before_ any such desire could be felt.

That the various species of _uneasiness_, which are elementary parts of our appetites, recur, at intervals, in which there is some degree of regularity, does not alter their nature, when they _do_ recur, so as to render a peculiar arrangement necessary for including them. The mental states, which constitute the uneasiness that is felt, recur thus at intervals, not from any thing peculiar in the mind itself, the phenomena of which alone we are considering, but because the body is only at intervals in the state, which precedes or induces those peculiar mental affections. If, instead of the _two_ or _three_ periods, at which the appetite of hunger recurs, the nervous system were, one hundred times in the day, at intervals the most irregular, in that state, which is immediately followed by the feeling of hunger, the painful feeling,--and the consequent desire of food, which has been found to relieve it,--would of course, be felt one hundred times in the day. The regularity, therefore, of the recurrence of this state of the nerves, is a phenomenon, which belongs to the consideration of the physiologist of the _body_, not of the physiologist of the _mind_, whose immediate office is finished, when he can trace any particular feeling of the mind to some affection of our organic frame, as its invariable antecedent; and who knowing, therefore, that the feeling of pain in any of our appetites, is the effect or result of some organic affection, is not surprised that it should not recur, when that organic affection has not previously taken place,--any more than he is surprised that we do not enjoy the fragrance of roses or violets, when there are no particles of odour to be inhaled by us; or do not listen to songs and choral harmonies, when there is no vibration to be transmitted to the auditory nerve. It is at certain regular periods, that the full light of day, and the twilight of morning and evening, are perceived by us. But we do not think it necessary, on this account, to give any peculiar name to these visual perceptions, to distinguish them from others less regular, because we know, that the reason of the _periodic_ recurrence of these perceptions, is that the various degrees of sunshine, which produce them, exist only at such intervals. We are _hungry_, when the nerves of the stomach are in a certain state; we perceive the sun, when the organ of vision is in a certain state. It is as little wonderful, that we should _not_ have the feeling of hunger, except when the nerves of the stomach are in this state, as that we should _not_ have the perception of the meridian sun, when the sun itself is beneath our horizon.

Since the mere pains of appetite, however, most important as they truly are, for the ends which they immediately answer, are yet of little importance in relation to our general knowledge, it is unnecessary to dwell on them at length. But I cannot quit the consideration of them, without remarking that admirable provision which the gracious Author of Nature has made by them, for the preservation not of our _being_ merely, but of our _well-being_--of that health and vigour, without which, a frail and feverish existence, at least in its relation to this earthly scene, would be of little value. The daily waste of the body requires daily supply to compensate it; and if this supply be neglected, or be inadequate--or, on the other hand, if it be inordinately great, _disease_ is the necessary consequence. To preserve the _medium_, therefore, or at least to prevent any very great deviation from it, _He_, who planned our feelings and faculties as well as our bodily frame, has made it painful for us to omit what is so important to life; and painful also to prolong the supply in any great proportion, after the demands of nature have been adequately satisfied. If food had afforded gratification only as relieving the pain of hunger, these natural boundaries of appetite would have required no aid from _moral_ or _physical_ lessons of temperance. But the indulgence of nature, in conferring on us the sense of taste, and making food a luxury as well as a relief, we abuse, as we abuse her other kindnesses. The pleasures of this most intemperate of senses, may lead, in some degree, beyond the due point of supply, the greater number of mankind; and may drive, to excesses more injurious, all those herds of unthinking sensualists who prefer the sickly enjoyment of an hour, to the health and virtue, and intellectual as well as physical comfort, of more frugal repasts. Yet even to them, nature points out in the feeling of satiety, where intemperance begins, or where it has already begun; and if they persist, notwithstanding this feeling, how much more would they be in danger of over-loading the powers of life, if there had been no such feeling of growing uneasiness, to suppress the avidity of insatiable indulgence.

“Though a man knew,” says Dr Reid, “that his life must be supported by _eating_, reason could not direct him when to eat, or what; how much, or how often. In all these things, appetite is a much better guide than reason. Were reason only to direct us in this matter, its calm voice would often be drowned in the hurry of business, or the charms of amusement. But the voice of appetite rises gradually, and, at last, becomes loud enough to call off our attention from any other employment.”[61]

If indeed, the necessary supply were long neglected, the morbid state of the body which would ensue, though no pain of actual hunger were to be felt, would convince, at last, the sufferer of his folly. But the providence of our gracious Creator, has not trusted the existence of man to the dangerous admonition of so rough a monitor, which might, perhaps, bring his folly before him only when it was too late to be wise. The pain of hunger--that short disease, if it may be so termed, which it is in our power so speedily to cure, prevents diseases that more truly deserve the name. Between _satiety_ on one side, and _want_ on the other, the stream of health flows tranquilly along, which, but for these boundaries, would speedily waste itself and disappear; as the most magnificent river, which, if dispersed over a boundless plain, would flow almost into nothing, owes its abundance and majestic beauty to the very _banks_ that seem to confine its waters within too narrow a channel.

Besides those particular feelings of bodily uneasiness, which, as attended with desire, constitute our appetites, there are other affections of the same class, which, though not usually ranked with our external sensations or perceptions, because we find it difficult to ascribe them to any local organ, are unquestionably to be arranged under the same head; since they are feelings which arise, as immediately and directly from a certain state of a part of the nervous system, as any of the feelings which we more commonly ascribe to external sense. Of this kind is that muscular pleasure of _alacrity_ and action, which forms so great a part of the delight of the _young_ of every species of living beings, and which is felt, though in a less degree, at every period of life, even the most advanced; or which, when it ceases in age, only gives place to another species of muscular pleasure--that which constitutes the pleasure of ease--the same species of feeling, which doubles, to ever one, the delight of exercise, by sweetening the repose to which it leads, and thus making it indirectly, as well as directly, a source of enjoyment.

In treating of what have been termed the _acquired perceptions of vision_, which are truly what give to vision its range of power, and without which the mere perception of colour would be of little more value than any other of the simplest of our sensations, I shall have an opportunity of pointing out to you some most important purposes, to which our muscular feelings are instrumental; and in the nicer analysis which I am inclined to make of the perceptions commonly ascribed to touch,--if my analysis be accurate--we shall find them operating at least as powerfully. At present, however, I speak of them merely as sources of animal pleasure or pain, of pleasure during moderate exercise and repose, and of pain during morbid lassitude, or the fatigue of oppression and unremitted labour.

The pleasure which attends good health, and which is certainly more than mere freedom from pain, is a pleasure of the same kind. It is a pleasure, however, which, like every other long continued bodily pleasure, we may suppose, to be diminished by habitual enjoyment; and it is therefore, chiefly, on recovery from sickness, when the habit has been long broken by feelings of an opposite kind, that we recognize what it must originally have been; if, indeed it be in our power to separate, completely, the mere animal pleasure from those mingling reflecting pleasures which arise from the consideration of past pain, and the expectation of future delight. To those among you, who know what it is to have risen from the long captivity of a bed of sickness, I need not say, that every function is, in this case, more than mere vigour; it is a happiness, but to breathe and to move; and not every limb merely, but almost every fibre of every limb, has its separate sense of enjoyment. “What a blessed thing it is to breathe the fresh air!” said Count Struensee, on quitting his dungeon, though he was quitting it only to be led to the place of execution, and cannot, therefore, be supposed to have felt much more than the mere animal delight.

“He does not scorn it, who, imprisoned long
In some unwholesome dungeon, and a prey
To sallow sickness, which the vapours, dank
And clammy of his dark abode have bred,
Escapes at last to liberty and light;
His cheek recovers soon its healthful hue;
His eye relumines its extinguish'd fires;
He walks, he leaps, he runs--is wing'd with joy,
And riots in the sweets of every breeze.”[62]

On these mere animal gratifications, however, I need not dwell any longer. There is much more to interest our curiosity, in the sensations and perceptions which more frequently go under those names; to the consideration of which I shall proceed in my next Lecture.

FOOTNOTES:

[60] Gray de Principiis Cogitandi, Lib. I. v. 1-5.

[61] On the Active Powers, Essay III. c. 1.

[62] Cowper's Task, book i.

LECTURE XVIII.

ON THE MORE DEFINITE EXTERNAL AFFECTIONS OF MIND IN GENERAL.

In my Lecture yesterday, after some further elucidation of the _triple division_ which we formed of the mental phenomena, as external or sensitive affections of the mind, intellectual states of the mind,--emotions,--I proceeded to consider the first of these divisions, of which the characteristic distinction is, that the phenomena included in it have their causes or immediate antecedents _external_ to the mind itself. In this division, I comprehended, together with the feelings which are universally ascribed to certain organs of sense, many feelings, which, though unquestionably originating in states of our bodily organs, as much as our other sensations, are yet commonly ranked as a different order--such as our various appetites, or rather that elementary uneasiness which is only a part, but still an essential part of our appetites, and which is easily distinguishable from the mere desire, which is the other element; since, however rapid the succession of them may be, we are yet conscious of them as successive. The particular uneasiness, it is evident, must have been felt as a sensation before the desire of that which is to relieve the uneasiness could have arisen. To the same class, too, I referred the various organic feelings, which constitute the animal pleasure of good health, when every corporeal function is exercised in just degree; and in a particular manner, our _muscular_ feelings, whether of mere general lassitude or alacrity; or those fainter differences of feelings which arise in our various motions and attitudes, from the different muscles that are exercised, or from the greater or less contraction of the same muscles. These muscular feelings, though they may be almost unnoticed by us, during the influence of stronger sensations, are yet sufficiently powerful, when we attend to them, to render us, independently of sight and touch, in a great measure sensible of the position of our body in general, and of its various parts; and comparatively indistinct as they are, they become,--in many cases, as in the acquired perceptions of vision, for example, and equally too, as I conceive, in various other instances, in which little attention has been paid to them by philosophers,--_elements_ of some of the nicest and most accurate judgments which we form.

It is, however, to that widest and most important order of our external affections, which comprehends the feelings more commonly termed _sensations_, and universally ascribed to particular organs of sense, that we have now to proceed. In these, we find the rude elements of all our knowledge, the materials on which the mind is ever operating, and without which, it seems to us almost impossible to conceive that it could ever have operated at all, or could, even in its absolute inactivity, have been conscious of its own inert existence.

This order of our external feelings comprehends all those _states_ of mind, however various they may be, which immediately succeed the changes of state, produced, in any of our organs of sense, by the presence of certain external bodies. The mental affections are themselves,--as I have said,--commonly termed _sensations_; but we have no verb, in our language, which exactly denotes what is expressed in the substantive noun. To _feel_ is, in its two senses, either much more limited or much more general, being confined, in its restricted meaning, to the sensations of one organ, that of touch,--and as a more general word, being applicable to all the varieties of our consciousness, as much as to those particular varieties, which are immediately successive to the affections of our organs of sense. We are said, in this wider use of the term, to feel indignation, love, surprise, as readily as we are said to feel the warmth of a fire, or the coldness of snow.

In defining our sensations, to be those mental affections, which are immediately successive to certain organic affections, produced by the action of external things, it is very evident, that I have made two assumptions,--first of the existence of external things, that affect our organs of sense; and, secondly of organs of sense, that are affected by external things;--unless, indeed, the assumption of the existence of organs of sense be considered,--as in philosophic truth it unquestionably is--only another form of the assumption of the existence of external things, since, in relation to the sentient mind, the organs thus supposed to exist, are, in strictness of language, _external_, as much as the objects supposed to act upon them. All of which we are truly conscious, in sensation, is the mental affection, the last link of the series, in the supposed process; what we term our perceptions of organs of sense, or of other external things that act upon these--our ideas, for example, of a brain or an eye, a house or a mountain, being as truly states of our own percipient mind, and nothing but states of our own mind, as our feeling of joy or sorrow, hope or fear, love or hate,--to which we never think of giving an _existence_, nor a direct and immediate _cause_ of existence, _out_ of ourselves. By the very constitution of our nature, however, or by the influence of associations as irresistible as intuition itself,--it is impossible for us not to feel this essential reality in the causes of one set of our mental affections, in the same manner as it is impossible for us to ascribe it to another set. The brain, the eye, the house, the mountain, we believe, and cannot but believe, to have external existence, independent of our own; the joy and sorrow, hope and fear, love and hate, we believe, and cannot but believe, to be merely states of our own mind, occasioned by other former states of mind, and dependent, therefore, for their continuance, on our own continued existence only. Even in our wildest dreams,--in which we imagine all things that are possible, and almost all things which are impossible; we never consider our joy or sorrow, as directly indicative of any thing separate from ourselves, and independent of us,

“While o'er our limbs sleep's soft dominion spread,
What tho' our soul fantastic measures trod,
O'er fairy fields; or mourn'd along the gloom
Of pathless woods; or down the craggy steep
Hurl'd headlong, swam with pain the mantled pool;
Or scaled the cliff,--or danced on hollow winds,
With antic shapes, wild natives of the brain;”

it was still only the cliff, the wood, the pool, which we considered as _external_: the _sorrow_ with which we mourned along our gloomy track, the _pain_ with which we swam the turbid water, the _horror_ which we felt at the antic shapes, with which we mingled in the ghostly dance, were felt to be wholly _in ourselves_, and constituted, while they lasted, the very feeling of our own existence.--The belief of an external world is, however, to come afterwards under our full examination:--It is sufficient, for the present, to know, that in the period after infancy, to which alone our memory extends, we are led, irresistibly, to believe in it; and that the belief of it, therefore, in whatever manner it may have originated in the imperfect perceptions of our infancy, is now, when those perceptions are mature, so completely beyond the power of argument to overcome, that it exists, as strongly, in those who reason against it, as in those who reason for it;--that the reference to a direct external cause, however, does not accompany _every_ feeling of our mind, but is confined to a certain number of that long succession of feelings, which forms the varied consciousness of our life,--and that the feelings, with respect to which this reference is made, are the class of sensations, which, when combined with this reference, have commonly been distinguished by the name of perceptions. That we have no perfect evidence of the external existence thus ascribed by us,--independently of our own irresistible belief of it, may be allowed to the sceptic; and the reasoning of Doctor Reid on the subject, as far as he proceeds beyond the assertion of this irresistible belief, and attempts, what has been commonly regarded as a confutation of the scepticism on this point,--by representing it as proceeding on a mistake, with respect to the nature of our ideas,--is _itself_, as we shall afterwards find, nugatory and fallacious. But still, notwithstanding the errors of philosophers with respect to it, the belief itself is, in the circumstances in which we now exist, so truly a part of our constitution, that to contend against it in argument would be to admit its validity, since it would be to suppose the existence of some one whom we are fairly undertaking to instruct or to confute.

In what circumstance the intuitive belief,--if, as I have said, the belief be in any case intuitive,--arises; or rather, in how large a proportion of cases, in which the reference seems primary and immediate, it is, more probably, the effect of secondary associations transferred from sense to sense, will appear better after the minute analysis on which we are to enter, of the different tribes of our sensations.

In referring to the particular class of sensations, and consequently to an _external cause_, a certain number only of the affections of our mind, there can be no doubt, that we proceed _now_, in the mature state of our knowledge, with more accuracy, than we could have attained, in that early period of life, when our original feelings were more recent. We have now a clearer and more definite belief of an external world, and of objects of sensations separate from our sensations themselves; without which general belief, previously obtained, we should as little have ascribed to an external organic cause many of our feelings, which we now ascribe to one--our sensations of sound and fragrance, for example,--as we now ascribe to such an immediate external cause, our emotions of joy or sorrow. A still more important acquisition, is our knowledge of our own organic frame, by which we are enabled, in a great measure, to verify our sensations,--to produce them, as it were at pleasure, when their external objects are before us, and in this way to correct the feelings, which have risen spontaneously, by those, which we ourselves produce. Thus, when, _in reverie_, our conceptions become peculiarly vivid, and the objects of our thought seem almost to exist in our presence; if only we stretch out our hand, or fix our eyes on the forms that are permanently before us, the illusion vanishes. Our organ of touch or of sight, is not affected in the same manner, as if the object that charms us in our musing dream, were really present; and we class the feeling, therefore, as a conception,--not as a sensation,--which, but for the opportunity of this correction, we should unquestionably, in many instances, have done.

But though, in forming the class of our sensations, we derive many advantages from that full knowledge which the experience of many years has given, we purchase these by disadvantages which are perhaps as great, and which are greater, from the very circumstance, that it is absolutely out of our power to estimate their amount. What we consider as the _immediate_ sensation, is not the simple mental state, as it originally followed that corporeal change, which now precedes it; but, at least in the most striking of all the tribes of our sensations, is a very different one. We have the authority of reason, _a priori_, as shewing no peculiar connexion of the points of the retina with one place of bodies more than with another; and we have the authority also of observation, in the celebrated case of the young man who was couched by Cheselden, and in other cases of the same peculiar species of blindness, in which the eyes, by a surgical operation, have been rendered for the first time capable of distinct vision, that if we had had no organ of sense but that of sight, and no instinctive judgment had been superadded to mere vision, we should not have had the power of distinguishing the magnitude and distant place of objects;--a mere expanse of colour being all which we should have perceived, if even colour itself could in these circumstances, have been perceived by us as expanded. Yet it is sufficient now, that rays of light, precisely the same in number, and in precisely the same direction, as those which at one period of our life, exhibited to us colour, and colour alone, should fall once more on the same small expanse of nerve, to give us instantly that boundlessness of vision, which, almost as if the fetters of our mortal frame were shaken off, lifts us from our dungeon, and makes us truly citizens, not of the _earth_ only, but of the _universe_. Simple as the principle may now seem, which distinguishes our secondary or acquired perceptions of vision from those which were primary and immediate, it was long before the distinction was made; and till a period which--if we consider it in relation to those long ages of philosophic inquiry, or, rather, most unphilosophic argumentation, which had gone before--may be considered almost as in our own time, longitudinal distance was conceived to be as completely an original object of sight as the varieties of mere colour and brilliancy. There may, therefore--though we have not yet been able, and may never be able, to discover it,--be a corresponding difference in our other sensations, which now seem to us simple and immediate. In the case of sound, indeed, there is a very evident analogy to these visual acquired perceptions; since a constant reference to _place_ mingles with our sensations of this class, in the same manner, though not so distinctly, as in our perceptions of sight. We perceive the sound, as it were near or at a distance, in one direction rather than in another; as, in the case of longitudinal distance in vision, we perceive _colour_ at one distance rather than at another. Yet there is as little reason, from the nature of the organic changes themselves, to suppose, that different affections of our auditory nerves should _originally_ give us different notions of distance, as that such notions should originally be produced by different affections of the retina: and, as in sight and hearing, so it is far from improbable, that, in all our senses, there may, by the reciprocal influence of these upon each other, or by the repeated lessons of individual experience in each, be a similar modification of the original simple feelings, which, in that first stage of existence that opened to us the world and its phenomena, each individual organ separately afforded. Our reasoning with respect to them, therefore, as original organs of sense, may, perhaps, be as false, as our chemical reasoning would be, were we to attempt to infer the properties of an uncombined acid, or alkali, from our observation of the very different properties of a neutral salt, into the composition of which we know that the acid or the alkali has entered.

If, indeed, it were in our power to be introduced to a society, like that of which Diderot speaks, in his Letter on the Deaf and Dumb, and to hold communication with them, all our doubts on this subject would be removed. “What a strange society,” says he, “would five persons make, each of them endowed with one only of our five different senses; and no two of the party with the same sense! There can be no doubt, that, differing, as they must differ, in all their views of nature, they would treat each other as madmen, and that each would look upon the others with all due contempt. It is, indeed, only an image of what is happening every moment in the world; we have but one sense, and we judge of every thing.”[63]--“There is, however,” he justly remarks, “_one_ science, though but one science, in which the whole society of the different senses might agree,--the science which has relation to the _properties of number_. They might each arrive, by their separate abstractions, at the sublimest speculations of arithmetic and algebra; they might fathom the depths of analysis, and propose and resolve problems of the most complicated equations, as if they were all so many Diophantuses. It is perhaps,” he adds, “what the oyster is doing in its shell.”[64]

From such a society,--if, indeed, we could hold any communication with these profound algebraists, except in their common science of numbers,--we might undoubtedly learn, what are the direct immediate affections of mind, to which our senses individually give rise, and consequently, how much, while feeling has blended with feeling, they have reciprocally operated on each other. But, in our present circumstances, unaided by intercourse with such living abstractions, it is impossible for us to remove wholly this uncertainty, as to the kind and degree of influence, which experience may have had, in modifying our primary sensations. We may wish, indeed, to be able to distinguish our _present_ feelings, from those which the same objects _originally_ excited; but, since no memory can go back to the period, at which we did not perceive longitudinal distance, as it were, immediately by the eye, as little, we may suppose, can any memory go back to the period, when other sensations, less interesting than those of vision, were first excited. Could we trace the series of feelings, in a single mind,--as variously modified, in the progress from infancy to maturity,--we should know more of the intellectual and moral nature of man, than is probably ever to be revealed to his inquiry,--when in ages, as remote from that in which we live, and perhaps as much more enlightened, as our own age may be said to be in relation to the period of original darkness and barbarism, he is still to be searching into his own nature, with the same avidity as now, He must, indeed be a very dull observer, who has not felt, on looking at an infant, some desire to know the little processes of thought, that are going on in his curious and active mind; and who, on reflecting on the value, as an attainment in science, which the sagest philosopher would set on the consciousness of those acquisitions which infancy has already made, is not struck with that nearness, in which, in some points, extreme knowledge and extreme ignorance may almost be said to meet. What metaphysician is there, however subtile and profound in his analytical inquiries, and however successful in the analyses which he has made, who would not give all his past discovery, and all his hopes of future discovery, for the certainty of knowing with exactness what every infant feels? The full instruction, which such a view of our progressive feelings, from their very origin, in the first sensations of life, would afford, Nature, in her wisdom, however, has not communicated to us,--more than she has communicated to us the nature of that state of being, which awaits the soul after it has finished its career of mortality. Our existence seems, in our conception of it, never to have had a beginning. As far back as we can remember any event, there is always a period, that appears to us still farther back, the events of which we cannot distinguish; as, when we look toward the distant horizon, we see, less and less distinctly, in the long line which the sunshine of evening still illuminates, plains, and woods, and streams, and hills, more distant, half melting into air, beyond which our eye can find nothing,--though we are still certain, that other woods, and streams, and plains are there, and that it is only the imperfection of our sight, which seems to bound them as in another world. It is to man, when he thinks upon his own beginning, as if he felt himself in a world of enchantment, amid the shades and flowers of which he had been wandering, unconscious of the time at which he entered it, or of the objects that are awaiting him, when he shall have arrived at the close of that path, whose windings still lead him forward,--and knowing little more, than that he is himself happy, and that the unknown Being, who has raised this magnificent scene around him, must be the Friend of the mortal, whom he has deigned to admit into it.

“Well pleased he scans
The goodly prospect,--and, with inward smiles,
Treads the gay verdure of the painted plain,--
Beholds the azure canopy of heaven,
And living lamps, that over-arch his head,
With more than regal splendour,--bends his ear
To the full choir of water, air, and earth;
Nor heeds the pleasing error of his thought,
Nor doubts the painted green or azure arch,
Nor questions more the music's mingling sounds,
Than space, or motion, or eternal time;
So sweet he feels their influence to attract
His fixed soul, to brighten the dull glooms
Of care, and make the destined road of life
Delightful to his feet. So, fables tell,
The adventurous hero, bound on hard exploit,
Beholds with glad surprise, by secret spell
Of some kind sage, the patron of his toils,
A visionary paradise disclosed,
Amid the dubious wild;--With streams, and shades,
And airy songs, the enchanted landscape smiles,
Cheers his long labours, and renews his frame.”[65]

The philosophic use of the term _sensation_ does not necessarily imply, what, in its popular use, is considered almost as involved in it; and perhaps, therefore, it may not be superfluous to warn you, that it is not confined to feelings, which are pleasurable or painful, but extends to every mental affection, that is the immediate consequence of impression on our organs of sense,--of which mental states or affections, many, and, as I am inclined to think, by far the greater number, are of a kind, that cannot be termed either agreeable or disagreeable. Of the objects of sight, for example, which are of such very frequent occurrence, how _few_ are there, at which we look, either with pleasure or with pain,--if we except that indirect pleasure, which, in particular cases, they may afford, as communicating to us information, that is valuable in itself, or as gratifying even our idlest curiosity. To take one of the most striking cases of this sort,--though we may derive, from the perusal of a work that interests us, the purest delight, it is a delight, resulting only from the conceptions, which the author, in consequence of the happy contrivance of symbolic characters, has been able to transfuse, as it were, from his own mind into ours; but, during all the time of the perusal, sensations, almost innumerable, have been excited in us, by the separate characters, with which the pages are covered, that have never mingled even the faintest direct pleasure, with the general emotion, which they, and they alone, have indirectly produced.