FORM AND FEELING
One of the most noticeable and fruitful facts in psychology is the modification of the same feeling by difference of form. The Heaven lifts up my soul, the sight of the ocean seems to widen it. We feel the same force at work, but the difference, whether in mind or body that we should feel in actual travelling horizontally or in direct ascent, that we feel in fancy. For what are our feelings of this kind but a motion imagined, [together] with the feelings that would accompany that motion, [but] less distinguished, more blended, more rapid, more confused, and, thereby, co-adunated? Just as white is the very emblem of one in being the confusion of all.
VERBUM SAPIENTIBUS
Mem.—Not to hastily abandon and kick away the means after the end is or seems to be accomplished. So have I, in blowing out the paper or match with which I have lit a candle, blown out the candle at the same instant.
THE CONTINUITY OF SENSATIONS
How opposite to nature and the fact to talk of the "one moment" of Hume, of our whole being an aggregate of successive single sensations! Who ever felt a single sensation? Is not every one at the same moment conscious that there co-exist a thousand others, a darker shade, or less light, even as when I fix my attention on a white house or a grey bare hill or rather long ridge that runs out of sight each way (how often I want the German unübersekbar!) [untranslatable]—the pretended sight-sensation, is it anything more than the light-point in every picture either of nature or of a good painter? and, again, subordinately, in every component part of the picture? And what is a moment? Succession with interspace? Absurdity! It is evidently only the icht-punct in the indivisible undivided duration.
See yonder rainbow strangely preserving its form on broken clouds, with here a bit out, here a bit in, yet still a rainbow—even as you might place bits of coloured ribbon at distances, so as to preserve the form of a bow to the mind. Dec. 25, 1804.