32 



NAMES AND PROPOSITIONS. 



tools, the next best thing is to under- 

 stand thoroughly the defects of those 

 we have. I have therefore warned 

 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 endeavour so to employ 

 them as in no case to leave the mean- 

 ing doubtful or obscure. No one of 

 the above terms being altogether un- 

 ambiguous, 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 express what is 

 signified by a known word in some one 

 or other of its senses : unless authors 

 had an unlimited licence to coin new 

 words, 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 im- 

 proper 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 imperfect 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 under- 

 stood in its most enlarged sense. 



I. Feelings, or States of Con- 

 sciousness. 



§ 3. A Feeling and a State of Con- 

 sciousness 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 exist- 

 ence. 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 emo- 

 tional 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 lan- 

 guage ; just as, by a popular perver- 

 sion 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 sensations, but to the 

 sensations of a single sense, that of 

 touch, needs not to be more particu- 

 larly adverted to. 



Feeling, in the proper sense of the 

 term, is a genus, of which Sensation, 

 Emotion, and Thought, are subordi- 

 nate species. Un der the word Thought 

 is here to be included whatever we 

 are internally conscious of when we 

 are said to think ; from the conscious- 

 ness we have when we think of a red 

 colour without having it before our 

 eyes, to the most recondite thoughts 

 of a philosopher or poet. Be it re- 

 membered, however, that by a thought 

 is to be understood what passes in 

 the mind itself, and not any object 

 external to the mind, which the person 

 is commonly said to be thinking of. 

 He may be thinking of the sun, or of 



