2. In ordinary Sensation, as in looking round a room, there is a double consciousness,—objective and subjective. In the objective consciousness, we are affected with the qualities named magnitude, distance, form, colour, &c.; these are called object properties, properties of the external and extended universe. In the subject consciousness, we are alive to states of pleasure or of pain, which may go along with the other. We do not usually exist in both modes at one instant; we pass out of one into the other. Now the word Sensation covers both, although, to the object consciousness, “Perception” is more strictly applicable; and in contrast to Perception, Sensation would mean the subjective consciousness, the moments when we relapse from the object attitude and become subjective or self-conscious, or alive to pleasure and pain. When the mind is in the object phase, it is neutral or indifferent as respects enjoyment.
3. In Sensation, a distinction may be drawn between the present effect upon the mind, or the impression that would arise if the outward agent had operated for the first time, and the total of the past impressions of the same agent, which by its repetition are recalled to fuse with the present effect. The present view of the moon reinstates the sum total of the previous views held by memory, and is not what we should experience if we saw the moon for the first time. Now, if the recall of the previous impressions, or of the joint and iterated idea, be considered an addition made by the Intellect, being dependent on the retentive power of the mind, Sensation, as opposed to Intellect, would mean the force of the present impression and nothing more; or the difference between the 67 vividness of reality, and the inferior vividness of recollection. What we can retain when we shut our eyes would represent the force of our intelligence; the additional intensity when we resume our gaze, would represent the power of sensation or the actual experience.
This distinction suggests an important remark as to the whole nature of Sensation, namely, that there can hardly be such a thing as pure Sensation, meaning Sensation without any admixture of the Intellect. We may attribute this purity to the earliest impressions made upon the mind, but not to anything known in the experience of the adult. This mixture of Intellect with Sense is not confined to Retentiveness; the other intellectual functions, Discrimination and perception of Agreement, are inseparable from the exercise of the senses. We cannot have a sensation without a feeling of difference; warmth is a transition from cold, and a conscious discrimination of the two facts. So, whenever we repeat a sensation, we have the consciousness of the repetition, or agreement. Were not these modes of consciousness present, we should have no sensation, indeed no consciousness. There is thus no hard line between sense and intellect. The question as to the origin of our Ideas in Sense is not a real question, until we explain what we mean by Sense, and make allowance for this unavoidable participation of Intellect in sensation.
4. Sensation is commonly used to employ the whole of our primary feelings and susceptibilities, as opposed to the Emotions which are secondary or derived. It thus confounds together two different sides of our susceptibility, the active and the passive; the feelings arising in connection with our exertion of inward force or energy, and those arising under impressions from external things. Both are primary states of consciousness; they are alike dependent on modifications of our sensitive tissues. But, between the two, there is a contrast, wide, deep, and fundamental, completely missed by the older Psychologists, to the detriment of their handling of such vital questions as the origin of knowledge, and the perception of a material world. The name Sensation, pointing immediately to 68 the operation of the five senses, gave the slip to the feelings of energy, or brought them in partially and inadequately. Yet it is the only name we have for the primary susceptibilities of the organism including both movement and passive sensibility.—B.
[24] A question which, as far as I know, has been passed over by psychologists, but which ought not to be left unanswered, is this: Can we have ideas of ideas? We have sensations, and we have copies of these sensations, called ideas of them: can we also have copies of these copies, constituting a second order of ideas, two removes instead of one from sensation?
Every one will admit that we can think of a thought. We remember ourselves remembering, or imagine ourselves remembering, an object or an event, just as we remember or imagine ourselves seeing one. But in the case of a simple idea of sensation, i.e. the idea or remembrance of a single undivided sensation, there seems nothing to distinguish the idea of the idea, from the idea of the sensation itself. When I imagine myself thinking of the colour of snow, I am not aware of any difference, even in degree of intensity, between the image then present to my mind of the white colour, and the image present when I imagine myself to be seeing the colour.
The case, however, is somewhat different with those combinations of simple ideas which have never been presented to my mind otherwise than as ideas. I have an idea of Pericles; but it is derived only from the testimony of history: the real Pericles never was present to my senses. I have an idea of Hamlet, and of Falstaff; combinations which, though made up of ideas of sensation, never existed at all in the world of sense; they never were anything more than ideas in any mind. Yet, having had these combinations of ideas presented to me through the words of Shakespeare, I have formed what is properly an idea not of an outward object, but of an idea in Shakespeare’s mind; and I may communicate my idea to others, whose idea will then be an idea of an idea in my mind. My idea of Pericles, or my idea of any person now alive whom I have never seen, differs from these in the circumstance that I 69 am persuaded that a real object corresponding to the idea does now, or did once, exist in the world of sensation: but as I did not derive my idea from the object, but from some other person’s words, my idea is not a copy of the original, but a copy (more or less imperfect) of some other person’s copy: it is an idea of an idea.
Although, however, the complex idea I have of an object which never was presented to my senses, is rightly described as an idea of an idea; my remembrance of a complex idea which I have had before, does not seem to me to differ from the remembered idea as an idea differs from a sensation. There is a distinction between my visual idea of Mont Blanc and the actual sight of the mountain, which I do not find between my remembrance of Falstaff and the original impression from which it was derived. My present thought of Falstaff seems to me not a copy but a repetition of the original idea; a repetition which may be dimmed by distance, or which may, on the contrary, be heightened by intermediate processes of thought; may have lost some of its features by lapse of time, and may have acquired others by reference to the original sources; but which resembles the first impression not as the thought of an object resembles the sight of it, but as a second or third sight of an object resembles the first. This question will meet us [again] in the psychological examination of Memory, the theory of which is in no small degree dependent upon it.—Ed.