he mind, or of the mind apart from them.
Soon objects of sense were merged in sensations and feelings, but
feelings and sensations were still unanalyzed. At last we return to
the doctrine attributed by Plato to Protagoras, that the mind is only a
succession of momentary perceptions. At this point the modern philosophy
of experience forms an alliance with ancient scepticism.

The higher truths of philosophy and religion are very far removed from
sense. Admitting that, like all other knowledge, they are derived from
experience, and that experience is ultimately resolvable into facts
which come to us through the eye and ear, still their origin is a
mere accident which has nothing to do with their true nature. They
are universal and unseen; they belong to all times--past, present, and
future. Any worthy notion of mind or reason includes them. The proof of
them is, 1st, their comprehensiveness and consistency with one another;
2ndly, their agreement with history and experience. But sensation is of
the present only, is isolated, is and is not in successive moments. It
takes the passing hour as it comes, following the lead of the eye or
ear instead of the command of reason. It is a faculty which man has in
common with the animals, and in which he is inferior to many of them.
The importance of the senses in us is that they are the apertures of the
mind, doors and windows through which we take in and make our own the
materials of knowledge. Regarded in any other point of view sensation
is of all mental acts the most trivial and superficial. Hence the term
'sensational' is rightly used to express what is shallow in thought and
feeling.

We propose in what follows, first of all, like Plato in the Theaetetus,
to analyse sensation, and secondly to trace the connexion between
theories of sensation and a sensational or Epicurean philosophy.

Paragraph I. We, as well as the ancients, speak of the five senses, and
of a sense, or common sense, which is the abstraction of them. The
term 'sense' is also used metaphorically, both in ancient and modern
philosophy, to express the operations of the mind which are immediate or
intuitive. Of the five senses, two--the sight and the hearing--are of
a more subtle and complex nature, while two others--the smell and the
taste--seem to be only more refined varieties of touch. All of them
are passive, and by this are distinguished from the active faculty of
speech: they receive impressions, but do no