DOCTETNE OE SENSITIVE PEBCEPTION. 289 



fact, resistance as a subjective mode will, upon reflection, be seen, 

 (Sir W. Hamilton holds) to be a relative, having for its correlative 

 (the consciousness of which is therefore necessarily involved in our 

 consciousness of resistance as an organic mode) a degree of out- 

 ward force or pressure opposed to our locomotive energy. A person 

 exerting a muscular effort, and feeling that the limb which he essays 

 to move is impeded, cannot be conscious of resistance in this phasis, 

 as an effort of self, an organic mode, without at the same time being 

 conscious of it in its other phasis, as a force which is not self-oppos- 

 ing the attempted movement of his organism. It may thus be 

 understood how relations in space of the corporeal organism to what 

 is extraorganic, as well as relations in space of the organism to itself, 

 fall within the reach of the perceptive faculty. Modes of resistance 

 are immediately apprehended in the organism, as actual phenomena ; 

 this is sensation. In and along with the immediate apprehension of 

 the fact of their existence, comes a consciousness of the mutual rela- 

 tion of outness in which they stand to one another ; this is percep- 

 tion, revealing the organism as extended. But still further, in the 

 same indivisible act of consciousness, we apprehend our organism 

 standing in the relation to something extraorganic, of being 

 resisted by it ; this is perception recognising the existence of 

 extraorganic objects. We do not indeed immediately know that 

 what resists our locomotive energy is body or matter : we only learn 

 in course of time, mediately, through induction, to connect pressure 

 with bodies. But even prior to induction, immediately, in and along 

 with sensations of resistance, and the accompanying perception of 

 relations of extension in our organism, we have a knowledge of a re- 

 sisting extraorganic something — whether identical with matter, or in 

 any way connected therewith, deponent (to wit consciousness) saith 

 not. 



We remarked when speaking of sensation, that, in virtue of the 

 union betwixt the mind and the animated organism, the special affec- 



other ? By no means. Extension is not supposed to be apprehended in the consciousness of 

 the affections A and B as actual phenomena ; but only in the consciousness of their mutual 

 outness. If, however, neither the affection A per se, nor the affection B per se, reveals the 

 organism as extended, then all that is fairly implied in the mutual outness of A and B, is, 

 that the organism is plural, compound, having the locus of one element here, and that of 

 another there— which is a, very different thing from saying that it is a continuously extended 

 substance, or composed of elements which possess continuous extension- Even though 

 the organism of our bodies were known to exist as a congeries of elements external to one 

 another, it might still be the case that matter did not possess extension in the proper sense 

 of the term ; in other words, matter might not be a substance in which different points 

 could be taken, such that the substance would stretch as an unbroken continuum from one 

 f them to the rest. 



