SENSATION. 9 



are moulded by them, other thoughts with other ' objects ' 

 come, and the ' same thing ' which was apprehended as a 

 jjresent this soon figures as a past that, about which many 

 unsuspected things have come to light. The principles of 

 this development have been laid down already in Chapters 

 XII and XIII, and nothing more need here be added to 

 that account. 



" THE BELATIVITY OF KNOWLEDGE." 



To the reader who is tired of so much Erkenntnisstheoric 

 I can only say that I am so myself, but that it is indispen- 

 sable, in the actual state of opinions about Sensation, to try 

 to clear up just what the word means. Locke's pupils seek 

 to do the impossible with sensations, and against them we 

 must once again insist that sensations ' clustered together ' 

 cannot build uj) our more intellectual states of mind. 

 Plato's earlier pupils used to admit Sensation's existence, 

 grudgingly, but they trampled it in the dust as something 

 corporeal, non-cognitive, and vile.* His latest followers 



state of the orgaoism yields but oue feeliug, however numerous may be its 

 parts and its exposures. . . . To this originalUnity of consciousness it makes 

 uo difference that the tributaries to the single feeliug are beyond the organ, 

 ism instead of within it, in an outside object with several sensible proper- 

 ties, instead of in the living body with its several sensitive functions. . . . 

 The unity therefore is not made by ' association ' of several components; 

 but the plurality is formed by dissociation of unsuspected varieties within 

 the unity ; the substantive thing being no product of synthesis, but the 

 residuum of differentiation." (J. Martineau : A Study of Religion (1888), 

 p 193-4.) Compare also F. H. Bradley, Logic, book i. chap. ii. 



* Such passages as the following abound in anti-sensationalist literature: 

 " Sense is a kind of dull, confused, and stupid perception obtruded upon 

 the soul from without, whereby it perceives the alterations and motions 

 within its own body, and takes cosjnizance of individual bodies existing 

 round about it, but does not clearly comprehend what they are nor pene- 

 trate into the nature of them, it being intended by nature, as Plotinus speaks, 

 not so properly for knoicledge as for the use of the body. For -he soul suf- 

 fering under that which it perceives by wa}^ of passion cannct master or 

 O&nquer it, that is to say, know or understand it. For so Anaxagoras in Aris- 

 totle very fitly expresses the nature of knowledge and intellection under 

 tile notion of Conquering. Wherefore it is necessary, since the mind under- 

 stands all things, that it should be free from mixture and passion, for this 

 end, as Anaxagoras speaks, that it may be able to master and conquer its 

 objects, that is to say, to know and understand them. In like manner Plo- 

 tinus, in his book of Sense and Memorj^ makes to suffer and to be conquered 

 r11 one, as also to knxiw and to conquer; for which reason he concludes that 



