Page:Essays on the Principles of Human Action (1835).djvu/121

example should be of something "more drossy and divisible," of something less reasonable, approaching nearer to pure sensation than we can conceive of any creature that exercises the functions of the meanest instinct). No one will contend that in this heap of living matter there is any idea of the number, position, or intricate involutions of that little, lively, restless tribe. This idea is evidently not contained in any of the parts separately, nor is it contained in all of them put together. That is, the aggregate of many actual sensations is, we here plainly see, a totally different thing from the collective idea, comprehension, or consciousness of those sensations as many things, or of any of their relations to each other. We may go on multiplying and combining sensations to the end of time without ever advancing one step in the other process, or producing one single thought. But in what, I would ask, does this supposition differ from that of many distinct particles of matter, full of animation, tumbling about, and pressing against each other in the same brain, except that we make use of this brain as a common medium to unite their different desultory actions in the same general principle of thought, or consciousness? Therefore if there is no power in this principle but to repeat the old story of sensation over again, if the mind is but a sort of inner room where the images of external things, like pictures in a gallery, are lodged safe and dry out of the reach of the turbulence of the senses, but remaining as distinct from, and if I may so say, as perfectly unknown to one another as those pictures, there being no general faculty to overlook and give notice of their several impressions, this medium is without any use, the hypothesis is so far an incumbrance, not an advantage. To perceive the relation of one thing to another it is not only necessary that the ideas of the things themselves should co-exist (which would signify