The lowest or Nutritive Soul the basis of all the rest The Sentient Soul:-Sense Perception; the Common Perceivables xxvii What is the meaning of our perceiving that we see or hear? The act of comparing sensations Highest form of the Noëtic Faculty, or Nous ib. It is the distinction of the Nous to be unrelated to our corporeal By means of Nous, the Soul acquires an improved aptitude for cog- Nous occurs to a certain extent in the animals The Nous is the place of Forms B.-Physical Accompaniments of Pleasure and Pain C.-The Germs and the Development of Volition INTRODUCTION. 1. THE CHAPTER I. DEFINITION AND DIVISIONS OF MIND. operations and appearances that constitute MIND are indicated by such terms as Feeling, Thought, Memory, Reason, Conscience, Imagination, Will, Passions, Affections, Taste. But the Definition of Mind aspires to comprehend in few words, by some apt generalization, the whole kindred of mental facts, and to exclude everything of a foreign character. Mind is commonly opposed to Matter, but more correctly to the so-called External World. These two opposites define each other. To know one is to know both. The External, or, in more philosophical language, the Object, World is distinguished by the property called Extension, pertaining both to resisting Matter, and to unresisting, or empty Space. The Internal, or the Subject, World is our experience of everything not extended; it is neither Matter nor Space. A tree, which possesses extension, is a part of the object world; a pleasure, a volition, a thought, are facts of the subject world, or of mind proper. Thus Mind is definable, in the first instance, by the method of contrast, or as a remainder arising from subtracting the Object World from the totality of conscious experience. It happens that the Object World is easily defined or circumscribed; the one well-understood property, Extension, serves for this purpose. Hence the alternative, or the correlative Mind, can be circumscribed with equal exactness. But this negative definition, although precise, so far as it goes, fails to indicate the full scope of the enquiry. Even after the substitution of the correcter phraseology,-Subject and Object for Internal and External,-we have to admit that Object Experience is still conscious experience, that is, Mind; and, although the development of the object properties belongs to other sciences, yet the foundations or beginnings of them must be traced in mental science. Now, it has been found possible to sum up all the properly mental phases in a small number of general properties, whose enumeration (which is strictly speaking a Division) is all that can be offered as a positive Definition of Mind. 2. The phenomena of the Unextended, or Subject Mind, are usually comprehended under three heads : I. FEELING, which includes, but is not exhausted by, our pleasures and pains. Emotion, passion, affection, sentiment —are names of Feeling. II. VOLITION, or the Will, embracing the whole of our activity as directed by our feelings. III. THOUGHT, Intellect, or Cognition. Our SENSATIONS, as will be afterwards seen, come partly under Feeling, and partly under Thought. The three classes of phenomena have each certain distinctive characteristics, and the sum of all these is a definition of mind, by a positive enumeration of its most comprehensive qualities. There is no one fact or property that embraces all the three. We may have a single name for the whole, as Mind, the Subject, the Unextended, Self-Consciousness; but it does not follow that one general property shall exhaust the whole. Volition is a distinct fact from Feeling, although presupposing it; and Thought is not necessarily implied in either of the two other properties. 3. A few remarks may here be offered, by way of elucidating this threefold definition and division. First. For a notion of what FEELING is, we must refer each person to their own experience. The warmth felt in sunshine, the sweetness of honey, the fragrance of flowers, the beauty of a landscape, are so many known states of feeling. Our pleasures and pains are all included under this head; but many other states, both simple and complex, that are neutral as regards pleasure and pain, must also be referred to it. The entire compass of our Feelings could be known only by an exhaustive enumeration; from which also we might expect to obtain a general definition of Feeling. It is not requisite at this stage that we should either classify the feelings, or arrive at their common or defining properties. It so happens, that we can readily circumscribe this part of our mental being, by that negative method already exemplified in the definition of mind as a whole: for the characters both of thought and of volition are remarkably intelligible and precise, and therefore give us a ready means of laying down the boundary of the remaining department. We may, however, remark, before passing to the consideration of the other divisions, that the presence of Feeling is the foremost and most unmistakable mark of mind. The members of the human race agree in manifesting it. The different orders of the brute creation show symptoms of the same endowment. The vegetable and mineral worlds are devoid of it. True, it is each in ourselves that we have the direct evidence of the state; no one person's consciousness being open to another person. But finding all the outward appearances that accompany feeling in ourselves to be present in other human beings, and, under some variety of degree, in the lower animals, we naturally conclude their mental state to be similar to our own. The gambols of a child, the smile of joy, a cry on account of pain, and the corresponding expressions for mental states common to all languages, prove that men in every age and nation have been. similarly affected. The terms for expressing pleasure and pain in their various forms and degrees, are names of feelings; joy, happiness, bliss, comfort, sorrow, misery, agonyare a few examples out of this part of the vocabulary. |