54 NAMES AND PROPOSITIONS. 



which must be made to use vague words so as to convey a pre- 

 cise meaning, is not wholly a matter of regret. It is not un- 

 fitting that logical treatises should afford an example of that, 

 to facilitate which is among the most important uses of logic. 

 Philosophical language will for a long time, and popular lan- 

 guage still longer, retain so much of vagueness and ambiguity, 

 that logic would be of little value if it did not, among its 

 other advantages, exercise the understanding in doing its work 

 neatly and correctly with these imperfect tools. 



After this preamble it is time to proceed to our enumera- 

 tion. We shall commence with Feelings, the simplest class 

 of nameable things; the term Feeling being of course under- 

 stood in its most enlarged sense. 



I. FEELINGS, OR STATES OF CONSCIOUSNESS. 



3. A Feeling and a State of Consciousness are, in the 

 language of philosophy, equivalent expressions : everything is 

 a feeling of which the mind is conscious ; everything which it 

 feels, or, in other words, which forms a part of its own sentient 

 existence. In popular language Feeling is not always synony- 

 mous with State of Consciousness ; being often taken more 

 peculiarly for those states which are conceived as belonging to 

 the sensitive, or to the emotional, phasis of our nature, and 

 sometimes, with a still narrower restriction, to the emotional 

 alone, as distinguished from what are conceived as belonging 

 to the percipient or to the intellectual phasis. But this is an 

 admitted departure from correctness of language ; just as, by a 

 popular perversion the exact converse of this, the word Mind is 

 withdrawn from its rightful generality of signification, and 

 restricted to the intellect. The still greater perversion by 

 which Feeling is sometimes confined not only to bodily sensa- 

 tions, but to the sensations of a single sense, that of touch, 

 needs not be more particularly adverted to. 



Feeling, in the proper sense of the term, is a genus, of 

 which Sensation, Emotion, and Thought, are subordinate 

 species. Under the word Thought is here to be included what- 



