Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: FEELING. 3 person to their own experience. The warmth felt in sunshine, the sweetness of honey, the fragrance of flowers, the beauty of a landscape, are so many known states of feeling. Our pleasures and pains are all included under this head; but many other states, both simple and complex, that are neutral as regards pleasure and pain, must also be referred to it. The entire compass of our Feelings could be known only by an exhaustive enumeration ; from which also we might expect to obtain a general definition of Feeling. It is not requisite at this stage that we should either classify the feelings, or arrive at their common or defining properties. It so happens, that we can readily circumscribe this part of our mental being, by that negative method ulreidy exemplified in the definition of mind as a whole : for the characters both of thought and of volition are remarkably intelligible and precise, and therefore give us a ready means of laying down the boundary of the remaining department. We may, however, remark, before passing to the consideration of the other divisions, that the presence of Feeling is the foremost and most unmistakable mark of mind. The members of the human race agree in manifesting it The different orders of the brute creation show symptoms of the same endowment The vegetable and mineral worlds are devoid of it True, it is each in ourselves that we have the direct evidence of the state; no one person's consciousness being open to another person. But finding all the outward appearances that accompany feeling in ourselves to be present in other human beings, and, under some variety of degree, in the lower animals, we naturally conclude their mental state to be similar to our own. The gambols of a child, the smile of joy, a cry on account of pain, and th...