Lectures on the Philosophy of the Human Mind (Vol. 1 of 3)

by Thomas Brown

ANALYSIS OF THE FEELINGS USUALLY ASCRIBED TO THE SENSE OF TOUCH, CONTINUED.

My last Lecture, Gentlemen, was employed in considering the information which we receive from the sense of touch, or rather the information which we are commonly supposed to receive from that sense,—but which, in a great part at least, I am inclined to ascribe to another source.

The qualities of bodies, supposed to be made known to us by touch, I reduced to two, of which all—whatever be the variety of names that express them,—are mere varieties, RESISTANCE and EXTENSION:—solidity, liquidity, viscidity, hardness, softness, roughness, smoothness, being modes of RESISTANCE, and nothing more;—figure, magnitude, divisibility, as evidently nothing more than modes of EXTENSION: and I stated reasons, which induce me to believe, that neither our feeling of resistance nor that of extension, has its direct origin in the sense of touch; though the original simple feeling, which this organ affords, is now, from constant association, almost indiscriminately combined with both, in some one or other of their varieties.

The first of these classes,—that which includes the various modifications of resistance,—I examined at great length, and showed, I trust, that it is not to our organ of touch we are indebted for these, but that they are feelings of another sense, of which our muscular frame is the organ,—the feelings, in short, of which every one must have been conscious, who has attempted to grasp any body, or to press against it, when the full contraction of the muscles must, of course, have been impeded. According as the body is hard or soft, rough or smooth,—that is to say, according as it resists, in various degrees, the progress of our effort of contraction,—the muscular feeling, which arises from the variously impeded effort, will vary in proportion; and we call hard, soft, rough, smooth, that which produces one or other of the varieties of these muscular feelings of resistance,—as we term sweet or bitter, blue or yellow, that which produces either of these sensations of taste or vision. With the feeling of resistance, there is, indeed, in every case, combined, a certain tactual feeling, because we must touch whatever we attempt to grasp; but it is not of this mere tactual feeling we think, when we term bodies hard or soft,—it is of the greater or less resistance which they afford to our muscular contraction.

I next proceeded to consider the other class of supposed tangible qualities, which includes the various modifications of extension, and urged many arguments to show, in like manner, that,—however indissolubly these may seem at present to be connected with the simple feelings of our organ of touch,—it is not to our simple original feelings of this sense, that we owe our knowledge of them, as qualities of things without.

Though the notion of extension, however, may arise in the manner which I have supposed, this, it may be said, is not the notion of external existence. To what, then, are we to ascribe the belief of external reality, which now accompanies our sensations of touch? It appears to me to depend on the feeling of resistance,—the organ of which, as a muscular feeling, I before explained to you, which breaking in, without any known cause of difference, on an accustomed series, and combining with the notion of extension, and consequently of divisibility, previously acquired, furnishes the elements of that compound notion, which we term the notion of matter. Extension, resistance;—to combine these simple notions in something which is not ourselves, and to have the notion of matter, are precisely the same thing; as it is the same thing to have combined the head and neck of a man with the body and legs of a horse, and to have the notion of that fabulous being, which the ancients denominated a centaur. It certainly, at least, would not be easy for any one to define matter more simply, than as that which has parts, and that which resists our effort to grasp it; and, in our analysis of the feelings of infancy, we have been able to discover how both these notions may have arisen in the mind, and arisen too, in circumstances, which must lead to the combination of them in one complex notion.

The infant stretches out his arm for the first time, by that volition without a known object, which is either a mere instinct, or very near akin to one,—this motion is accompanied with a certain feeling,—he repeats the volition which moves his arm fifty or one thousand times, and the same progress of feeling takes place during the muscular action. In this repeated progress, he feels the truth of that intuitive proposition, which, in the whole course of the life that awaits him, is to be the source of all his expectations, and the guide of all his actions,—the simple proposition, that what has been as an antecedent, will be followed by what has been as a consequent. At length he stretches out his arm again, and instead of the accustomed progression, there arises, in the resistance of some object opposed to him, a feeling of a very different kind which, if he persevere in his voluntary effort, increases gradually to severe pain, before he has half completed the usual progress. There is a difference, therefore, which we may, without any absurdity, suppose to astonish the little reasoner; for the expectation of similar consequents, from similar antecedents, is observable even in his earliest actions, and is probably the result of an original law of mind, as universal, as that which renders certain sensations of sight and sound the immediate result of certain affections of our eye or ear. To any being, who is thus impressed with belief of similarities of sequence, a different consequent necessarily implies a difference of the antecedent. In the case at present supposed, however, the infant, who as yet knows nothing but himself, is conscious of no previous difference; and the feeling of resistance seems to him, therefore, something unknown, which has its cause in something that is not himself.

I am aware, that the application to an infant, of a process of reasoning expressed in terms of such grave and formal philosophic nomenclature, has some chance of appearing ridiculous. But the reasoning itself is very different from the terms employed to express it, and is truly as simple and natural, as the terms, which our language obliges us to employ in expressing it, are abstract and artificial. The infant, however, in his feeling of similarity of antecedents and consequents, and of the necessity, therefore, of a new antecedent, where the consequent is difficult, has the reasoning, but not the terms. He does not form the proposition as universal, and applicable to cases that have not yet existed; but he feels it in every particular case, as it occurs. That he does truly reason, with at least as much subtility, as is involved in the process now supposed, cannot be doubted by those who attend to the manifest results of his little inductions, in those acquisitions of knowledge, which show themselves in the actions, and, I may say, almost in the very looks of the little reasoner,—at a period long before that to which his own remembrance is afterwards to extend, when, in the maturer progress of his intellectual powers, the darkness of eternity will meet his eye alike, whether he attempt to gaze on the past, or on the future; and the wish to know the events, with which he is afterwards to be occupied and interested, will not be more unavailing, than the wish to retrace events, that were the occupation and interest of the most important years of his existence.

Then,

“So—when the mother, bending o'er his charms,