THINGS DENOTED BY NAMES. 65 



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 lan- 

 guage will for a long time, and popular language perhaps 

 always, 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 imper- 

 fect tools. 



After this preamble it is time to proceed to our 

 enumeration. We shall commence with Feelings, the 

 simplest class of nameable things; the term Feeling 

 being of course understood 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 con- 

 scious : everything which it feels, or, in other words, 

 which forms a part of its own sentient existence. In 

 popular language Feeling is not always synonymous 

 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 per- 

 cipient, or intellectual phasis. But this is an ad- 

 mitted departure from correctness of language ; just 



VOL. I. F 



