lition. By
thought is meant all that we are internally conscious of when we think;
e.g. the idea of the sun, and not the sun itself, is a thought; and so,
not even an imaginary thing like a ghost, but only the idea of it, is a
thought. In like manner, a sensation differs both from the object
causing it, and the attribute ascribed to the object. Yet language
(except in the case of the sensations of hearing) has seldom provided
the sensations with separate names; so that we have to name the
sensation from the object or the attribute exciting it, though we might
_conceive_ the sensation to exist, though it never actually does,
without an exciting cause. Again, another distinction has to be attended
to, viz. the difference between the sensation and the state of the
bodily organs, which is the physical agency producing it. This
distinction escapes notice partly by reason of the division of the
feelings into bodily and mental. But really there is no such division,
even sensations being states of the sentient mind, and not of the body.
The difference, in fact, between sensations, thoughts, and emotions, is
only in the different agency producing the feeling; it being, in the
case of the sensations, a bodily, and, for the other two, a mental
state. Some suppose, after the sensation, in which, they say, the mind
is passive, a distinct active process called perception, which is the
direct recognition of an external object, as the cause of the sensation.
Probably, perceptions are simply cases of belief claiming to be
intuitive, i.e. free of external evidence. But, at any rate, any
question as to their nature is irrelevant to an inquiry like the
present, viz. how we get the non-original part of our knowledge. And so
also is the distinction in German metaphysics, between the mind's _acts_
and its passive _states_. Enough for us now that they are all states of
the mind.

II. Substances.--Logicians think they have defined substance and
attribute, when they have shown merely what difference the use of them
respectively makes in the grammar of a sentence. They say an attribute
must be an attribute _of_ something, but that a substance is
self-existent (being followed, if a relative, by _of_, not _qua_
substance, but _qua_ the relation). But this _of_, as distinguishing
attributes, itself needs explanation: besides, we can no more conceive a
substance independent of attributes, than an attribute independent of a
substance. Metaphysicians