Secondly. All beings recognized as possessing mind can not only feel, but also ACT. The putting forth of force to attain some end marks a mental nature. Eating, running, flying, sowing, building, speaking-are operations rising above the play of feeling. They all originate in some feelings to be satisfied, which gives them the character of proper mental actions. When an animal tears, masticates, and swallows its food, hunts its prey, or flees from danger, the stimulus or support of the activity is furnished by its sensations or feelings. To this feeling-prompted activity we give the name Volition.

The characteristic of being stimulated by the feelings of sentient beings makes a wide contrast between volition and the energies familiar to us in nature, the powers of wind, water, gravity, steam, gunpowder, electricity, vegetation, &c. For although the strong personifying tendency of mankind has often compared these powers to a human will, yet in reasoning about them scientifically no such comparison is admitted; while, in the explanation of voluntary actions, the reference to feeling and to thought is indispensable.

Volition is farther contrasted with such animal functions as breathing, the circulation of the blood, and the movements of the intestines. These are actions, and serve a purpose, but they are not mental actions. We could imagine ourselves so constituted, that these processes would have had to be prompted and controlled by sensations, emotions, and desires; they would then have been mental actions. As it is, they form a class apart, denominated Reflex Actions. When narrowly examined, they appear to shade by insensible degrees into voluntary actions; but we are not on that account to confound the broad and fundamental distinction between the unconscious and the conscious, involved in the opposition of the reflex and the voluntary.

It is impossible, in a brief preliminary sketch, to indicate and discriminate all the varieties of animal activity. There is a complication to be unravelled in this department of the mind, such as to test severely the resources of mental science.

It is sufficient to remark, as the most general law of volition, that pleasure prompts to action for its continuance, increase, or renewal; and that pain prompts to action for its cessation, abatement, or prevention.

Thirdly. The concluding attribute of the mental constitution is THOUGHT, Intelligence, or Cognition. This includes such functions as Memory, Reason, Judgment, and Imagination. The first fact implied in it is Discrimination, or sense of difference, shown by our being conscious of one sensation as more intense than another, or when we are aware of two feelings as differing in kind,-for example, taste and smell, pain and pleasure, fear and anger. Another fact is Similarity, or sense of agreement, which is interwoven with the preceding in all the processes of thought. When we identify any sensation or present mental impression with one that occurred previously, there being an interval between, we exemplify the power of similarity; the sun seen to-day recalls our previous impressions of his appearance. A third fact or property of the Intellect is Retentiveness, commonly understood by the familiar names 'memory' and 'recollection.' This power is essential to the operation of the two former powers; we could not discriminate two successive impressions, if the first did not persist mentally to be contrasted with the second; and we could not identify a present feeling with one that had left no trace in our framework. Retentiveness, which sums up all that we designate by memory, acquisition, education, habit, learning by experience, is not wanting in the lower orders of sentient life. For an animal to have a home, a certain degree of memory is requisite.

We have seen that Volition is separated from Feeling, by superadding the characteristic of action, or the putting forth of energy to serve an end. And now, after the foregoing enumeration of Intellectual attributes, we can draw the line between Thought and Feeling, which is to complete the definition of mind, so far as is needful at the outset.

In proportion as a mental experience contains the facts named discrimination, comparison, and retentiveness, it is

an Intellectual experience; and in proportion as it is wanting in these, and shows itself in pleasure or pain, it is of the nature of Feeling. The very same state of mind may have both an intellectual side and an emotional side; indeed, this is a usual occurrence. And, like many things that are radically contrasted, as day and night, these two distinct facts of our nature pass into one another by a gradual transition, so that an absolute line of separation is not always possible; a circumstance that does not invalidate the genuineness of their mutual contrast.

The exercise of Thought is greatly mixed up with Volition also, but there is rarely any difficulty in distinguishing the two functions. Indeed, it is hardly possible for us to exist in one exclusive state. Still, in our explanations of things, we often require to separate in statement what is not separated in fact.

4. If we advert to the various classifications of the mental phenomena that have hitherto passed current, we shall find that the three attributes above specified have been more or less distinctly recognized.

In the old division of mind into Understanding and Will, the element of Feeling would appear to be left out entirely. We shall find in fact, however, that the feelings are implied in, or placed under, both heads. The same remark applies to Reid's classification, also twofold and substantially identical with the foregoing, namely, into Intellectual Powers and Active Powers. The submerged department of Feeling will be found partly mixed up with the Intellectual Powers, wherein are included the Senses and the Emotions of Taste, and partly treated of among the Active Powers, which comprise the exposition of the benevolent and the malevolent Affections.

Dr. Thomas Brown, displeased with the mode of applying the term 'Active' in the above division, went into the other extreme, and brought forward a classification where Feeling seems entirely to overlie the region of Volition. He divides mental states into External affections and Internal affections. By external affections he means the feelings we have by the Senses, in other words, Sensation. The internal affections he

CLASSIFICATIONS OF MIND.

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subdivides into Intellectual states of mind and Emotions. His division therefore is tantamount to Sensation, Emotion, and Intellect. All the phenomena commonly recognized as of an active or volitional character, he classes as a part of Emotion. Sir William Hamilton, in remarking on the arrangement followed in the writings of Dugald Stewart, states his own view as follows:-'If we take the Mental to the exclusion of Material phenomena, that is, the phenomena manifested through the medium of Self-consciousness or Reflection, they naturally divide themselves into three categories or primary genera; the phenomena of Knowledge or Cognition,—the phenomena of Feeling or of Pleasure and Pain, and the phenomena of Conation or of Will and Desire.* Intelligence, Feeling, and Will, are thus distinctively set forth.

I may farther notice the mode of laying out the subject that has occurred to an able physiologist. I quote a passage intended as introductory to the Anatomy of the Nervous System.

'Of the functions performed through the agency of the nervous system, some are entirely corporeal, whilst others involve phenomena of a mental or psychical nature. In the latter and higher class of such functions are first to be reckoned those purely intellectual operations, carried on through the instrumentality of the brain, which do not immediately arise from an external stimulus, and do not manifest themselves in outward acts. To the same class also belong sensation and volition. In the exercise of sensation, the mind becomes conscious, through the medium of the brain, of impressions conducted or propagated to that organ along the nerves from distant parts; and in voluntary motion, a stimulus to action arises in the brain, and is carried outwards by the nerves from the central organ to the voluntary muscles. Lastly, emotion, which gives rise to gestures and movements, varying with the different mental affections which they express, is an involuntary state of the mind, connected with some part of the brain, and influencing the muscles through the medium of the nerves.'+

Editor.

Collected Works of Dugald Stewart, Vol. II.: Advertisement by the

+ Dr. Sharpey, in QUAIN's Anatomy, 6th edition, p. clxviii.

In this passage a quadruple partition is indicated,-Sensation, Intellect, Emotion, and Volition. Sensation is raised to the rank of a primary division. Except, however, as regards one important point to be afterwards adverted to, there is nothing in Sensation that does not come either under Feeling, as above defined, or under Intellect.

5. In the plan of the present volume, Part first, entitled 'Movement, Sense, and Instinct,' will include the discussion of both Feeling and Volition in their lower forms, that is, apart from Intellect, or so as to involve Intellect in the least possible degree; the Sensations of the different Senses will form a leading portion of the contents. This division will comprise all that is primitive or instinctive in the susceptibilities and impulses of the mental organization. The second Part will aim at a full exposition of the Intellectual properties.

Thus, while Feeling, Volition, and Intellect are regarded as the ultimate properties and the fundamental classification of mind, it is not proposed that the exposition should proceed strictly in the order thus stated.

Although Feeling and Volition, in their elementary aspect, can be explained before entering on the consideration of the Intellect, while one large important department of Feeling, namely, Sensation, is always considered as introductory to the Intellectual powers, yet the full exposition of the Emotions and the Active impulses of our nature properly comes last in the systematic arrangement of the mind.

6. It is requisite at the outset to give some intimation of a great mental law involved in the fundamental property of Discrimination above noticed, namely, the law of RELATIVITY. By this is meant that, as change of impression is an indispensable condition of our being conscious, or of being mentally alive either to feeling or to thought, every mental experience is necessarily twofold. We can neither feel nor know heat, except in the transition from cold. In every feeling there are two contrasting states; in every act of knowing, two things are known together.