DISCRIMINATION OF EXPENDED FORCE.

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Inertia, or the Mechanical property of matter. No feeling of the human mind is more fundamental, more constant, or more worked up into complex products, than this. When a weight is put into the hand, we are aware of an expenditure of force; when the amount is increased, we are conscious of increased expenditure. The delicacy of our discrimination is the smallness of the addition or the subtraction that will alter our consciousness. An ordinary person can discriminate between

39 and 40 ounces.

The feeling of graduated resistance is brought out in encountering or checking a body in motion, as in stopping a carriage or in obstructing another person's progress. It is also manifested in putting forth power to move resisting bodies, as in rowing a boat, digging the ground, or other manual exertion; likewise in bearing burdens. We have it present to us, in supporting our own body. Our varying experience in all these forms, consists of a varying muscular consciousness, a series of modes of expended energy, which the memory can retain, and which we can associate with other mental states, as with the sensations of colour, of sound, of contact, &c. We connect one degree of resistance with a small, and another with a large, optical impression, as in comparing a pebble with a paving stone.

The delicate discrimination of degrees of muscular expenditure serves us in many manual operations; for example, in graduating a blow, in throwing a missile to a mark, and in forming plastic substances to a certain consistency.

We have a consciousness of distinctness, remarkable in its kind, between exertions made by different muscles; for example, in the two hands. It is not the same to us that a pound weight is put into either hand; if it were so, we should be in the proverbial situation of not knowing the right hand from the left.

13. Secondly, a muscular exertion may vary in continuance; and this variation is felt by us as different from variation in the intensity of the effect.

A dead strain of unvarying amount being supposed, we are differently affected according to its duration. If we make a push lasting a quarter of a minute, and, after an interval, renew it for half a minute, there is a difference in the consciousness of the two efforts. The endurance implies an increased expenditure of power in a certain mode, and we are distinctly aware of such an increase. We know also that it is

not the same as an increase in the intensity of the strain. The two modes of increase are not only discriminated as regards degree, they are also felt to be different modes. The one is our feeling and measure of Resistance or Force, the other stands for a measure of Time. All impressions made on the mind, whether those of muscular energy, or those of the ordinary senses, are felt differently according as they endure for a longer or a shorter time.

The estimate of continuance thus attaches to dead resist

ance, but not to that alone. When we put forth power to move, as in pulling an oar, or in lifting a weight, we are aware of different degrees of continuance of the movement. Moreover, we do not confound movement with dead strain; we are distinctively affected by the two modes of exercising force; supposing the total amount of power expended the same, the consciousness of each is characteristic.

Now Continuance of Movement expresses a different fact from continuance of dead strain. It is the sweep of the organ through space, and is, therefore, the measure of space or extension. It is the first step, the elementary sensibility, in our knowledge of space. Other experiences must be combined in this great fundamental notion, but here we have the primary ingredient.

The simplest form of muscular continuance is the sweep of a limb in one direction, nearly corresponding with linear extension (the spontaneous sweep of the arm is not a straight line). A greater complication of movement is involved in superficial extension; and a greater still, in cubical extension. But in the last resort, linear, superficial, and solid extension are to us nothing but the consciousness of continued and complicated movements, which we can associate in different groups, and remember among our intellectual acquisitions. A square foot of surface is embodied in one muscular grouping, a circle of three feet in diameter in another, a nine inch cube in a third; these muscular groupings may be tactual, visual, or locomotive, one or all, as will be afterwards seen.

14. Thirdly, as regards movements, the speed may vary; and we are characteristically conscious of the variation.

It is probable that the peculiar difference of character, above adverted to, between slow and quick movements, is an element in our discrimination of change of speed. When we increase the rate of movement of the arm, we are aware not merely that more virtue has gone out of us, but also that the

DISCRIMINATION OF VELOCITY OF MOVEMENT.

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mode is not the same as an increased strain or an increased continuance. This is a valuable addition to our means of muscular discrimination. It enables us, in the first place, to be directly cognizant of the important attribute of speed or velocity of movement, whether in ourselves or in bodies without us. It supplies, in the next place, a farther means of measuring extension, checking and supplementing that derived from the continuance of a uniform movement. A greater velocity, under one amount of continuance, is equivalent to a less velocity with a greater continuance.

CHAPTER II.

SENSATION.

1. A SENSATION is defined as the mental impression, feeling, or conscious state, resulting from the action of external things on some part of the body, called on that account sensitive.

Such are the feelings caused by tastes, smells, sounds, or sights. They are distinguished from the feelings of energy expended from within (the muscular), and from the emotions, as fear and anger, which do not arise immediately from the stimulus of a sensitive surface.

2. The Sensations are classified according to their bodily Organs; hence the division into Five Senses.

Distinctness of organ is accompanied with distinctness of agent, and of feeling, or consciousness. Light, as an agency, is distinct from sound, and the consciousness under each is characteristic; we should never confound a sight with a sound. The common enumeration of the Five Senses is defective.

When the senses are regarded principally as sources of knowledge, or the basis of intellect, the five commonly given are tolerably comprehensive; but when we advert to sensation, in the aspect of pleasure and pain, there are serious omissions. Hunger, thirst, repletion, suffocation, warmth, and the variety

of states designated by physical comfort and discomfort, are left out; yet these possess the characteristics of sensation as above defined, having a local organ or seat, a definite agency, and a characteristic mode of consciousness.

The omission is best supplied by constituting a group of Organic Sensations, or Sensations of Organic Life.

In the Senses as thus made up, it is useful to remark a division into two classes, according to their importance in the operations of the Intellect. If we examine the Sensations of Organic Life, Taste, and Smell, we shall find that as regards pleasure and pain, or in the point of view of Feeling, they are of great consequence, but that they contribute little of the permanent forms and imagery employed in our Intellectual processes. This last function is mainly served by Touch, Hearing, and Sight, which may therefore be called the Intellectual Senses by pre-eminence. They are not, however, thereby prevented from serving the other function also, or from entering into the pleasures and pains of our emotional life.

SENSATIONS OF ORGANIC LIFE.

Like the senses generally, these will be classified according to Locality or Seat.

Organic Muscular Feelings.

3. The passive feelings, or sensations proper, connected with Muscle, are chiefly the pains of injury, and the pains and pleasures of fatigue and repose.

When a muscle is cut, lacerated, or otherwise injured, or when seized with spasm, there is a feeling of acute pain. We shall describe this state in full, as typifying, once for all, the class of acute physical pains.

PHYSICAL SIDE.-The Bodily Origin is some destruction or injury of the muscular fibres, such as to irritate violently the imbedded nerves.

The Bodily Diffusion, or Expression, is various and interesting to study. The features are violently contorted, and assume certain characteristic appearances; the voice is excited to sharp utterances; the whole body is agitated. In short, movements are stimulated, intense according to the pain.

ACUTE PHYSICAL PAINS TYPIFIED.

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The accompaniment of sobbing shows that the involuntary muscles and the glands may also be affected; which is confirmed by closely observing the changes in the heart and the lungs, the effects on digestion, on the skin, &c.; all which changes are of the nature of depression and derangement.

MENTAL SIDE.-As Feelings, these states are indicated by the name. In Quality, they are painful; in Degree, acute or intense. As respects Specialities of character, we find a certain number of discriminative names; pains are racking, burning, shooting, pricking, smarting, aching, stunning; distinctions of importance in pathology.

Violent pains are apt to rouse certain of the special emotions, as grief, terror, rage; the selection depending less upon the nature of the pain than on the temper and circumstances of the individual.

The Volitional character of an acute pain would be, according to the law of the Will, to stimulate efforts for relief and avoidance. Such is the fact, but with an important qualification. The operation of the will demands a certain remaining vigour in the active organs; now, pain soon exhausts the strength; hence the will is paralyzed by long continuance of the irritation. A temporary smart quickens the energies, a continued agony crushes them.

Part of the expression of a sufferer is made up of postures and efforts of a voluntary kind, prompted with a view to relief; these vary with the locality and the nature of the attack.

The Intellectual quality of acute physical pains is complicated. Intensity of excitement is favourable to impressiveness; while in extreme degrees, the intellectual functions are paralyzed. These two considerations allowed for, the discrimination and the persistence of organic states are at the bottom of the scale of feelings. They are very inadequately remembered.

People differ greatly in their effective recollection of pains, no less than in the memory for language or for scenery; and the consequences are notable. First, the recollection of pain is the essential feature of preventive or precautionary volition, that is, Prudence. Secondly, it constitutes the basis of fellowfeeling, or sympathy. The Socratic doctrine that knowledge is virtue, might be transmuted into a profound and important truth, if knowledge were interpreted as the effective recollection of good and evil. Virtue has its sources in the retentive property of the Intellect; but the subject matter of the recollection is not knowledge, but feelings.