A Limit to Evohttion 299 



tilde of individuals of the same kind — to all horses. At the 

 same time, the idea or conception considered in itself is one. 

 It is a single notion — not indeed a notion of any individual 

 subsisting thing, but of a kind or class of things, real or pos- 

 sible, to each one of which the notion is applicable. It is 

 therefore a general or universal idea. 



The contrast, the difference of Jcind, which exists between 

 this intellectual conception and the various forms oi feeling, 

 is very great. 



Feelings, whether single or in groups of groups, are all 

 modifications of the sentience of the being who is the subject 

 of them. They are impressions made on our sensitivity by 

 individual things, or faint revivals of plexuses of such im- 

 pressions antecedently made. They are therefore essentially 

 individual and subjective, while our intellectual perceptions 

 are essentially universal and, as they always refer to objects, 

 objective.^ In all our automatic actions, there is no reference 

 of objects to their classes. Things affect our organs of sense 

 and so excite appropriate corresponding movements, and 

 similar causes excite similar effects; but sense-perception 

 does not apprehend them as of this or that kind, while such 

 apprehension is of the essence of the act of intellectual 

 perception. 



The profound difference between (1) an idea, and (2) a 

 feeling or group of feelings, is particularly conspicuous with 

 respect to our idea of ' being ' or ' existence.' It is, as before 

 said, applicable to everything; and is so fundamental that, 

 without having it, nothing can be apprehended or understood. 



1 As Mr. Lewes has well said {Problems of Life and Mind, 3rd series, 

 p. 497) : ' No aggregations of mathematical lines can make a mathematical 

 surface, for lines are without breadth. No aggregation of images will make 

 an idea, for images are particular, and of concrete objects, whereas ideas are 

 general, and abstracted from the concrete by a special operation. It is true 

 we cannot imagine a line without breadth, nor a general object withoiit 

 particular qualities, but we can and do think these, and this mode of think- 

 ing is Ideation or Conception.' 



