Conclusion 259 
reading and writing are. Feeling is in all probability the 
result of the same kind of slow laborious development as 
that which has attended our more recent arts and our 
bodily organs ; its development must be supposed to have 
followed the same lines as that of our other arts, and indeed 
of the body itself, which is the avs artium—for growth of 
mind is throughout coincident with growth of organic 
resources, and organic resources grow with growing mind. 
Feeling is the art the possession of which differentiates 
the civilised organic world from that of brute inorganic 
matter, but still it is an art ; it is the outcome of a mind 
that is common both to organic and inorganic, and which 
the organic has alone cultivated. It is not a part of mind 
itself ; it is no more this than language and writing are 
parts of thought. The organic world can alone feel, just as 
man can alone speak ; but as speech is only the develop- 
ment of powers the germs of which are possessed by the 
lower animals, so feeling is only a sign of the employment 
and development of powers the germs of which exist in 
inorganic substances. It has all the characteristics of an 
art, and though it must probably rank as the oldest of those 
arts that are peculiar to the organic world, it is one which 
is still in process of development. None of us, indeed, can 
‘feel well on more than a very few subjects, and many can 
hardly feel at all. bed 
But, however this may be, our sensations and perceptions 
of material phenomena are attendant on the excitation of 
certain motions in the anterior parts of the brain. When- 
ever certain motions are excited in this substance, certain 
sensations and ideas of resistance, extension, &c., are either 
concomitant, or ensue within a period too brief for our 
cognisance. It is these sensations and ideas that we 
directly cognise, and it is to them that we have attached 
the idea of the particular kind of matter we happen to be 
thinking of.. As this idea is not like the thing itself, so 
neither is it like the motions in our brain on which it is 
