Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind

by James Mill

A painful or a pleasurable sensation is a peculiar state of mind. A man knows it, only by having it; and it is impossible that by words he can convey his feeling to others. The effort, however, to convey the idea of it, has given occasion to various forms of expression, all of which are greatly imperfect. The state of mind under a pleasurable or painful sensation is such, that we say, the sensation engrosses the mind; but this really means no more than that it is a painful or pleasurable sensation; and that such a sensation is a state of mind very different from an indifferent sensation. The phrase, engrossing the mind, is sometimes exchanged for the word Attention. A pleasurable or painful sensation is said to fix the 364 Attention of the Mind. But if any man tries to satisfy himself what it is to have a painful sensation, and what it is to attend to it, he will find little means of distinguishing them. Having a pleasurable or painful sensation, and attending to it, seem not to be two things, but one and the same thing. The feeling a pain is attending to it; and attending to it is feeling it. The feeling is not one thing, the attention another; the feeling and the attention are the same thing.

An objector may appeal to certain cases, in which one sensation of the pleasurable or painful kind seems to be swallowed up, as it were, by another. Thus, in the agony of the gout, or toothache, the uneasiness of some local cutaneous inflammation is hardly perceived. The case here is that of two uneasy sensations, one slight; the other intense. According to the supposition, that attention is but a name given to the having of an interesting sensation, what ought to happen in this case is that precisely which does happen. The stronger sensation is, the stronger attention. And that the feebler sensation merges itself in the stronger, and is lost in it, is matter of common and obvious experience. Thus we are every instant, as long as we are awake, shutting and opening our eyelids. We are, therefore, alternately in light and darkness. But as the light is the stronger sensation of the two, we have the sensation of light without interruption. Thus, too, if a stick ignited at one end is rapidly turned round in a circle, though it is obvious that the ignited object is at only one part of the circle at a time, and all the other parts are in darkness, the circle, nevertheless, assumes the 365 appearance of being wholly ignited. There is not a more striking exemplification of this law than what is exhibited by the comparison of our sleeping and waking thoughts. In dreams, when our trains are composed of Ideas, unmixed with sensations, the Ideas have so much vividness as to be taken for sensations.[65] In our waking trains, sensations and ideas are mixed together; but as each sensation introduces many ideas, however numerous the sensations may be, the ideas are many times more numerous. Yet such is the effect of the more vivid to obscure the less vivid feeling, that our day does not appear a day of ideas, but a day of sensations.

[⁶⁵] The author makes frequent reference to dreams, but it may be doubted whether he has seized the explanation of that obscure phenomenon. It is an approximately correct statement of one circumstance of dreams, that the Ideas are unmixed with sensations; in a sound slumber, we are inaccessible to the sensations of the five senses. We are not equally fortified against the organic sensations, as those of digestion and other functions. The sensations absent are a very important class, as regards objective or outward reality; and it is probably their absence, as competitors on this ground, that allows the ideas to swell out into an unnatural and illusory prominence, as if they alone were the full reality. This is a more probable account of the illusion, than the circumstance given in the text, “the greater vividness” of the monopolising Ideas, although that too is a fact, and may tend in the same direction.—B.

There are cases in which the effect which is thus produced by a stronger sensation with respect to a weaker, or by sensations with respect to ideas, is also produced by one idea with respect to another. Innumerable cases can be adduced to prove, and, 366 indeed, it forms one of the great features of what we call the intellectual nature of man, that Ideas, by their accumulation, are capable of acquiring a power, superior to that of sensations, both as pleasure and as pain. The pleasures of Taste, the pleasures of Intellectual exertion, the pleasures of Virtue, acquire when duly cultivated, a power of controlling the solicitations of appetite, and are esteemed a more valuable constituent of happiness than all that sense can immediately bestow.

On the power of ideas, as the stronger feelings, to swallow up sensations, in the same manner as stronger sensations swallow up the weaker, some decisive experiments have been made. The wretches who, nearly a century ago, were made tools of in France, under the title of convulsionnaires, to carry on the purposes of Fanaticism, were so placed under the dominion of certain ideas, being persons of weak intellects and strong imagination, and operated upon by men skilled in the ways of perverting feeble understandings, that the ideas became feelings far more potent than the sensations; and when the bodies of the frenzied creatures were subjected to operations calculated to produce the most intense sufferings, they denied that they felt any thing, and by the whole of their demeanour confirmed, as far as it could confirm, the truth of their asseverations. That men in the ardour of battle receive wounds of a serious nature, without being aware of them, till after a considerable lapse of time, is testified upon unsuspicious evidence.

These instances, therefore, it is manifest, form no objection to our conclusion, that the attending to an 367 interesting sensation, and the having the sensation, are but two names for the same thing.

We have now to consider, what it is, to attend to an indifferent sensation. The force of the word indifferent implies, that an indifferent sensation is not an object of attention on its own account. If it were an object of attention on its own account, it would not be indifferent. If it is regarded, however, as the cause, or the sign, of an interesting sensation, we are already acquainted with the process which takes place. The idea of the interesting sensation is immediately associated with it; the state of consciousness then is not an indifferent sensation merely; it is a sensation and an idea, in union. The idea besides is an interesting idea, that of a pain or pleasure.

The union of an interesting idea, with an indifferent sensation, makes a compound state of consciousness which, as a whole, is interesting. As the having an interesting sensation, and the attending to it, are but two names for the same thing; the having a sensation rendered interesting by association, and the attending to it, cannot be regarded as two different things. In the first case, attention is merely a sensation of a particular kind; in the second, it is merely an association of a particular kind.

We have now to shew what takes place, when the attention, to use the common language, is not directed to Sensations but Ideas.

Ideas are, like sensations, of two kinds. They are either interesting, or not interesting. We need not repeat what has been so often said respecting the origin and composition of those two classes of Ideas, and the cause of their difference.