48 NAMES AND PKOPOSITIONS. 



sufficient variety of precise words fitted to express them, there should be 

 no practice to which even scientific thinkers are more addicted than that 

 of taking valuable words to express ideas which are sufficiently expressed 

 by other words already appropriated to them. 



When it is impossible to obtain good tools, the next best thing is to un- 

 derstand thoroughly the defects of those we have. I have therefore warn- 

 ed the reader of the ambiguity of the names which, for want of better, I 

 am necessitated to employ. It must now be the writer's endeavor so to 

 employ them as in no case to leave the meaning doubtful or obscure. No 

 one of the above terms being altogether unambiguous, I shall not confine 

 myself to any one, but shall employ on each occasion the word which seems 

 least likely in the particular case to lead to misunderstanding; nor do I 

 pretend to use either these or any other words with a rigorous adherence 

 to one single sense. To do so would often leave us without a word to ex- 

 press what is signified by a known word in some one or other of its senses : 

 unless authors had an unlimited license to coin new woi'ds, together with 

 (what it would be more difficult to assume) unlimited power of making 

 readers understand them. Nor would it be wise in a writer, on a subject 

 involving so much of abstraction, to deny himself the advantage derived 

 from even an improper use of a term, when, by means of it, some familiar 

 association is called up which brings the meaning home to the mind, as it 

 were by a flash. 



The difficulty both to the writer and reader, of the attempt which must 

 be made to use vague words so as to convey a precise meaning, is not 

 wholly a matter of regret. It is not unfitting 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 

 language 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 im- 

 perfect tools. 



After this preamble it is time to proceed to our enumeration. We shall 

 commence with Feelings, the simplest class of namable things ; the terra 

 Feeling being of course understood in its most enlarged sense. 



I. Feelings, or States op Consciousness. 



§ 3. A Feeling and a State of consciousness are, in the language of phi- 

 losophy, equivalent expressions : every thing is a feeling of which the mind 

 is conscious; every thing which it feels, or, in other words, which forms a 

 part of its own sentient existence. In popular language Feeling is not al- 

 ways synonymous with State of Consciousness; being often taken more 

 peculiarly for those states which are conceived as belonging to the sensi- 

 tive, 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 with- 

 drawn from its rightful generality of signification, and restricted to the 

 intellect. The still greater perversion by which Feeling is sometimes con- 

 . fined not only to bodily sensations, 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 



