AN EXPOSITION AND CRITICISM. 307 



manifestations of so many powers or faculties of knowledge. The 

 faculties, into which the general cognitive faculty of the mind may 

 thus be divided, appear to me to be six. 



First Faculty. — The Presentative. 

 As we possess knowledge and have not possessed it always, we must 

 have a faculty by which it has been at first acquired or presented to 

 the mind. Such a faculty may therefore be called the Acquisitive or 

 Fresentative, and when directed to the nonego, is External Perceptions, 

 when directed to the ego, Self-consciousness. 



§1. Fxternal Perception. « 



External or Sensitive Perception, or Perception simply, when used 

 in a less restricted sense, is the consciousness, in one's own body, 

 either (L) of those special affections of which,* as an animated organ- 

 ism, it is succeptible, or (2) of those general relations of extension, 

 which, as a material organism, it possesses in common with all 

 material things. Only the latter consciousness is Perception proper ; 

 the former i^ Sensation proper (Reid's Works, p. 876). This dis- 

 tinction it is necessary to explain, as well as a correlative distinction 

 in the qualities of matter. 



A. The distinction between perception and sensation, noticed long 

 ago, has never been adequately understood, from never having been 

 viewed as merely a special instance of a more general contrast between 

 the phenomena of knowledge and the phenomena of feeling, but espe- 

 icially from the law, which governs their reciprocal relation, never 

 having been enounced. The law is that, above a certain limit,* know- 

 ledge and feeling, and therefore perception and sensation, though 

 always coexistent, are always in the inverse ratio of each other 

 (II. pp. 93-99) This law is proved, 



I. By comparing the several senses. For, in sight and hearing, 

 especially in the former, as distinguished from taste and smell, the 

 knowledge communicated evidently predominates over mere feeling, 

 while in the two latter senses the pleasures and pains absorb the con- 

 sciousness so entirely, that the information we receive from them is 

 reduced to a minimum. 



II. By comparing the several impressions of the same sense. The 

 difference between these may be either in degree or in kind. 1. A 

 certain degre?. of sensation is of course necessary to perception, and 

 therefore it is not without any reserve true that the minimum of sen- 



