Sketch Of A System Of The Philosophy Of The Human Mind

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1820 edition. Excerpt: ... CHAPTER V, OF THE SENSATIONS COMMONLY ASCRIBED TO TOUCH. Jln the senses as yet considered by us, we have seen only the sources of certain feelings, pleasing, painful or indifferent, which might begin and pass away like any other affections of the mind, without affording the slightest information, as to the existence of a system of external things. I. What is true of fragrance, and sweetness, and melody, is not less true of warmth and chilness, considered as mere sensations that arise from affections of our organ of touch. But there are other feelings, commonly ascribed to touch, which are peculiarly distinguished by a reference to external corporeal causes, and which are supposed to have afforded, primarily and immediately, to the infant mind the knowledge which is implied in that reference. With the exception of warmth and chilness, --which, as they have nothing peculiar to distinguish them from the varieties of sensation before considered by us, may in the present inquiry be laid out of account, --the perceptions ascribed to touch are only of modes of extension and resistance, the very compound which we have in view in all our definitions of matter. There may be in matter various other tendencies to excite various other feelings. But whether those other qualities be absent or present, we term Matter what is composed of parts and resists our effort to compress it. To what organ, then, are we to ascribe the external influences, which give occasion to these feelings of resistance and extension ? II. It is not to touch, as I conceive, that either of these is to be traced. Our feeling of resistance, in all its varieties of hardness, softness, roughness, smoothness, solidity, liquidity, &c. I consider as the result of organic affections, not..