If this view be taken we stand in much the same attitude towards our feelings as a dog may be supposed to do towards our own reading and writing.  The dog may be supposed to marvel at the wonderful instinctive faculty by which we can tell the price of the different railway stocks merely by looking at a sheet of paper; he supposes this power to be a part of our nature, to have come of itself by luck and not by cunning, but a little reflection will show that feeling is not more likely to have “come by nature” than reading and writing are.  Feeling is in all probability the result of the same kind of slow laborious development as that which has attended our more recent arts and our bodily organs; its development must be supposed to have followed the same lines as that of our other arts, and indeed of the body itself, which is the ars artium—­for growth of mind is throughout coincident with growth of organic resources, and organic resources grow with growing mind.

Feeling is the art the possession of which differentiates the civilised organic world from that of brute inorganic matter, but still it is an art; it is the outcome of a mind that is common both to organic and inorganic, and which the organic has alone cultivated.  It is not a part of mind itself; it is no more this than language and writing are parts of thought.  The organic world can alone feel, just as man can alone speak; but as speech is only the development of powers the germs of which are possessed by the lower animals, so feeling is only a sign of the employment and development of powers the germs of which exist in inorganic substances.  It has all the characteristics of an art, and though it must probably rank as the oldest of those arts that are peculiar to the organic world, it is one which is still in process of development.  None of us, indeed, can feel well on more than a very few subjects, and many can hardly feel at all.

But, however this may be, our sensations and perceptions of material phenomena are attendant on the excitation of certain motions in the anterior parts of the brain.  Whenever certain motions are excited in this substance, certain sensations and ideas of resistance, extension, &c., are either concomitant, or ensue within a period too brief for our cognisance.  It is these sensations and ideas that we directly cognise, and it is to them that we have attached the idea of the particular kind of matter we happen to be thinking of.  As this idea is not like the thing itself, so neither is it like the motions in our brain on which it is attendant.  It is no more like these than, say, a stone is like the individual characters, written or spoken, that form the word “stone,” or than these last are, in sound, like the word “stone” itself, whereby the idea of a stone is so immediately and vividly presented to us.  True, this does not involve that our idea shall not resemble the object that gave rise to it, any more than the fact that