Page:Essays on the Principles of Human Action (1835).djvu/58

recal the impression of his face or figure almost with the same vividness and reality as if he were actually present. The force then, with which the mind anticipates future pain in connection with the idea of continued consciousness, can only tend to produce voluntary action by making the idea stronger; but it could not have this effect at all if it were not of the nature of all pain, when foreseen by the mind, to produce a tendency that way; that is, to excite aversion, and a will to prevent it, however slight this may sometimes be. The sophism which lurks at the bottom of this last objection seems to be the confounding the idea of future pain as the cause or motive of action, with the after-reflection on that idea as a positive thing, itself the object of action. Finding in many cases that the first apprehension and momentary fear of danger was gone by, though the reason for avoiding it still remained the same, the mind would be easily led to seek for the true cause of action in something more fixed and permanent than the fleeting ideas of remote objects, and to require that every object, whether of desire or aversion, should have some stronger hold on the individual than it's momentary effect on his imagination before it became an object of serious pursuit, or the contrary. But in rejecting the ideas of things as themselves the ultimate grounds and proper objects of action, and referring the mind to the things themselves as the only solid basis of a rational and durable interest, we only go back to the first direct idea of the object, which in representing that object, is as distinct from any secondary reflection on, or oblique consciousness of itself as an absolute thing, the object of thought, as a sensation can be different from an idea, or a present impression from a future one. There is nothing in the foregoing theory which has any tendency to overturn the fundamental