190 LIFE IN NATURE. 



are not suffered to remain. It is true we feel force, 

 and cannot but feel it, when we are conscious of 

 exerting ourselves either for action or resistance ; 

 but also, almost whenever we are conscious at all, 

 we feel sensations of pleasure, pain, light, sound, 

 or taste, and so on. Yet, though feeling these, we 

 do not infer the existence of such sensations in 

 nature. They are our own merely ; only the child 

 fancies his pleasure or pain to be also in the things 

 that impart it to him. But that which the child 

 does in ascribing his feeling of pain to the insensi- 

 tive table, we do in ascribing our feeling of force, 

 which is really that of exertion, to the material 

 world. Force can no more be separated from a 

 perceiving consciousness, such as our own, than 

 colour or sweetness. We are called on to recognize 

 here, as we have already done in respect to other 

 sensations, that our own nature contributes to them, 

 and that our feeling is not the standard of what is 

 without us, but the effect produced upon ourselves. 



Now it is, doubtless, difficult to do this in respect 

 to force, and to admit that it is not (as we feel it 

 to be) in the very objects that seem to exert it The 



