§ 377. The knowledge of Mind is the highest and hardest, just because it is the most “concrete” of sciences. The significance of that “absolute” commandment, _Know thyself_—whether we look at it in itself or under the historical circumstances of its first utterance—is not to promote mere self-knowledge in respect of the _particular_ capacities, character, propensities, and foibles of the single self. The knowledge it commands means that of man’s genuine reality—of what is essentially and ultimately true and real—of mind as the true and essential being. Equally little is it the purport of mental philosophy to teach what is called _knowledge of men_—the knowledge whose aim is to detect the _peculiarities_, passions, and foibles of other men, and lay bare what are called the recesses of the human heart. Information of this kind is, for one thing, meaningless, unless on the assumption that we know the _universal_—man as man, and, that always must be, as mind. And for another, being only engaged with casual, insignificant and _untrue_ aspects of mental life, it fails to reach the underlying essence of them all—the mind itself.
§ 378. Pneumatology, or, as it was also called, Rational Psychology, has been already alluded to in the Introduction to the Logic as an _abstract_ and generalising metaphysic of the subject. _Empirical_ (or inductive) psychology, on the other hand, deals with the “concrete” mind: and, after the revival of the sciences, when observation and experience had been made the distinctive methods for the study of concrete reality, such psychology was worked on the same lines as other sciences. In this way it came about that the metaphysical theory was kept outside the inductive science, and so prevented from getting any concrete embodiment or detail: whilst at the same time the inductive science clung to the conventional common-sense metaphysic, with its analysis into forces, various activities, &c., and rejected any attempt at a “speculative” treatment.
The books of Aristotle on the Soul, along with his discussions on its special aspects and states, are for this reason still by far the most admirable, perhaps even the sole, work of philosophical value on this topic. The main aim of a philosophy of mind can only be to re-introduce unity of idea and principle into the theory of mind, and so re-interpret the lesson of those Aristotelian books.
§ 379. Even our own sense of the mind’s _living_ unity naturally protests against any attempt to break it up into different faculties, forces, or, what comes to the same thing, activities, conceived as independent of each other. But the craving for a _comprehension_ of the unity is still further stimulated, as we soon come across distinctions between mental freedom and mental determinism, antitheses between free _psychic_ agency and the corporeity that lies external to it, whilst we equally note the intimate interdependence of the one upon the other. In modern times especially the phenomena of _animal magnetism_ have given, even in experience, a lively and visible confirmation of the underlying unity of soul, and of the power of its “ideality.” Before these facts, the rigid distinctions of practical common sense were struck with confusion; and the necessity of a “speculative” examination with a view to the removal of difficulties was more directly forced upon the student.
§ 380. The “concrete” nature of mind involves for the observer the peculiar difficulty that the several grades and special types which develop its intelligible unity in detail are not left standing as so many separate existences confronting its more advanced aspects. It is otherwise in external nature. There, matter and movement, for example, have a manifestation all their own—it is the solar system; and similarly the _differentiae_ of sense-perception have a sort of earlier existence in the properties of _bodies_, and still more independently in the four elements.
The species and grades of mental evolution, on the contrary, lose their separate existence and become factors, states and features in the higher grades of development. As a consequence of this, a lower and more abstract aspect of mind betrays the presence in it, even to experience, of a higher grade. Under the guise of sensation, e.g., we may find the very highest mental life as its modification or its embodiment. And so sensation, which is but a mere form and vehicle, may to the superficial glance seem to be the proper seat and, as it were, the source of those moral and religious principles with which it is charged; and the moral and religious principles thus modified may seem to call for treatment as species of sensation. But at the same time, when lower grades of mental life are under examination, it becomes necessary, if we desire to point to actual cases of them in experience, to direct attention to more advanced grades for which they are mere forms. In this way subjects will be treated of by anticipation which properly belong to later stages of development (e.g. in dealing with natural awaking from sleep we speak by anticipation of consciousness, or in dealing with mental derangement we must speak of intellect).
What Mind (or Spirit) is.
§ 381. From our point of view Mind has for its _presupposition_ Nature, of which it is the truth, and for that reason its _absolute prius_. In this its truth Nature is vanished, and mind has resulted as the “Idea” entered on possession of itself. Here the subject and object of the Idea are one—either is the intelligent unity, the notion. This identity is _absolute negativity_—for whereas in Nature the intelligent unity has its objectivity perfect but externalised, this self-externalisation has been nullified and the unity in that way been made one and the same with itself. Thus at the same time it is this identity only so far as it is a return out of nature.
§ 382. For this reason the essential, but formally essential, feature of mind is Liberty: i.e. it is the notion’s absolute negativity or self-identity. Considered as this formal aspect, it _may_ withdraw itself from everything external and from its own externality, its very existence; it can thus submit to infinite _pain_, the negation of its individual immediacy: in other words, it can keep itself affirmative in this negativity and possess its own identity. All this is possible so long as it is considered in its abstract self-contained universality.
§ 383. This universality is also its determinate sphere of being. Having a being of its own, the universal is self-particularising, whilst it still remains self-identical. Hence the special mode of mental being is “_manifestation_.” The spirit is not some one mode or meaning which finds utterance or externality only in a form distinct from itself: it does not manifest or reveal _something_, but its very mode and meaning is this revelation. And thus in its mere possibility Mind is at the same moment an § 384. _Revelation_, taken to mean the revelation of the _abstract_ Idea, is an unmediated transition to Nature which _comes_ to be. As Mind is free, its manifestation is to _set forth_ Nature as _its_ world; but because it is reflection, it, in thus setting forth its world, at the same time _presupposes_ the world as a nature independently existing. In the intellectual sphere to reveal is thus to create a world as its being—a being in which the mind procures the _affirmation_ and _truth_ of its freedom.
_The Absolute is Mind_ (Spirit)—this is the supreme definition of the Absolute. To find this definition and to grasp its meaning and burthen was, we may say, the ultimate purpose of all education and all philosophy: it was the point to which turned the impulse of all religion and science: and it is this impulse that must explain the history of the world. The word “Mind” (Spirit)—and some glimpse of its meaning—was found at an early period: and the spirituality of God is the lesson of Christianity. It remains for philosophy in its own element of intelligible unity to get hold of what was thus given as a mental image, and what implicitly is the ultimate reality: and that problem is not genuinely, and by rational methods, solved so long as liberty and intelligible unity is not the theme and the soul of philosophy.
Subdivision.
§ 385. The development of Mind (Spirit) is in three stages:— (1) In the form of self-relation: within it it has the _ideal_ totality of the Idea—i.e. it has before it all that its notion contains: its being is to be self-contained and free. This is _Mind Subjective_.
(2) In the form of _reality_: realised, i.e. in a _world_ produced and to be produced by it: in this world freedom presents itself under the shape of necessity. This is _Mind Objective_.
(3) In that unity of mind as objectivity and, of mind as ideality and concept, which essentially and actually is and for ever produces itself, mind in its absolute truth. This is _Mind Absolute_.
§ 386. The two first parts of the doctrine of Mind embrace the finite mind. Mind is the infinite Idea; thus finitude here means the disproportion between the concept and the reality—but with the qualification that it is a shadow cast by the mind’s own light—a show or illusion which the mind implicitly imposes as a barrier to itself, in order, by its removal, actually to realise and become conscious of freedom as _its_ very being, i.e. to be fully _manifested_. The several steps of this activity, on each of which, with their semblance of being, it is the function of the finite mind to linger, and through which it has to pass, are steps in its liberation. In the full truth of that liberation is given the identification of the three stages—finding a world presupposed before us, generating a world as our own creation, and gaining freedom from it and in it. To the infinite form of this truth the show purifies itself till it becomes a consciousness of it.
A rigid application of the category of finitude by the abstract logician is chiefly seen in dealing with Mind and reason: it is held not a mere matter of strict logic, but treated also as a moral and religious concern, to adhere to the point of view of finitude, and the wish to go further is reckoned a mark of audacity, if not of insanity, of thought. Whereas in fact such a _modesty_ of thought, as treats the finite as something altogether fixed and _absolute_, is the worst of virtues; and to stick to a post which has no sound ground in itself is the most unsound sort of theory. The category of finitude was at a much earlier period elucidated and explained at its place in the Logic: an elucidation which, as in logic for the more specific though still simple thought-forms of finitude, so in the rest of philosophy for the concrete forms, has merely to show that the finite _is not_, i.e. is not the truth, but merely a transition and an emergence to something higher. This finitude of the spheres so far examined is the dialectic that makes a thing have its cessation by another and in another: but Spirit, the intelligent unity and the _implicit_ Eternal, is itself just the consummation of that internal act by which nullity is nullified and vanity is made vain. And so, the modesty alluded to is a retention of this vanity—the finite—in opposition to the true: it is itself therefore vanity. In the course of the mind’s development we shall see this vanity appear as _wickedness_ at that turning-point at which mind has reached its extreme immersion in its subjectivity and its most central contradiction.
SECTION I. MIND SUBJECTIVE.
§ 387. Mind, on the ideal stage of its development, is mind as _cognitive_: Cognition, however, being taken here not as a merely logical category of the Idea (§ 223), but in the sense appropriate to the _concrete_ mind.
Subjective mind is:— (A) Immediate or implicit: a soul—the Spirit in _Nature_—the object treated by _Anthropology_.
(B) Mediate or explicit: still as identical reflection into itself and into other things: mind in correlation or particularisation: consciousness—the object treated by the _Phenomenology of Mind_.
(C) Mind defining itself in itself, as an independent subject—the object treated by _Psychology_.
In the Soul is the _awaking of Consciousness_: Consciousness sets itself up as Reason, awaking at one bound to the sense of its rationality: and this Reason by its activity emancipates itself to objectivity and the consciousness of its intelligent unity.
For an intelligible unity or principle of comprehension each modification it presents is an advance of _development_: and so in mind every character under which it appears is a stage in a process of specification and development, a step forward towards its goal, in order to make itself into, and to realise in itself, what it implicitly is. Each step, again, is itself such a process, and its product is that what the mind was implicitly at the beginning (and so for the observer) it is _for itself_—for the special form, viz. which the mind has in that step. The ordinary method of psychology is to narrate what the mind or soul is, what happens to it, what it does. The soul is presupposed as a ready-made agent, which displays such features as its acts and utterances, from which we can learn what it is, what sort of faculties and powers it possesses—all without being aware that the act and utterance of what the soul is really invests it with that character in our conception and makes it reach a higher stage of being than it explicitly had before.
We must, however, distinguish and keep apart from the progress here studied what we call education and instruction. The sphere of education is the individual’s only: and its aim is to bring the universal mind to exist in them. But in the philosophic theory of mind, mind is studied as self-instruction and self-education in very essence; and its acts and utterances are stages in the process which brings it forward to itself, links it in unity with itself, and so makes it actual mind.
Sub-Section A. Anthropology. The Soul.
§ 388. Spirit (Mind) _came into_ being as the truth of Nature. But not merely is it, as such a result, to be held the true and real first of what went before: this becoming or transition bears in the sphere of the notion the special meaning of “_free judgment_.” Mind, thus come into being, means therefore that Nature in its own self realises its untruth and sets itself aside: it means that Mind presupposes itself no longer as the universality which in corporal individuality is always self-externalised, but as a universality which in its concretion and totality is one and simple. At such a stage it is not yet mind, but _soul_.
§ 389. The soul is no separate immaterial entity. Wherever there is Nature, the soul is its universal immaterialism, its simple “ideal” life.
Soul is the _substance_ or “absolute” basis of all the particularising and individualising of mind: it is in the soul that mind finds the material on which its character is wrought, and the soul remains the pervading, identical ideality of it all. But as it is still conceived thus abstractly, the soul is only the _sleep_ of mind—the passive νοῦς of Aristotle, which is potentially all things.
The question of the immateriality of the soul has no interest, except where, on the one hand, matter is regarded as something _true_, and mind conceived as a _thing_, on the other. But in modern times even the physicists have found matters grow thinner in their hands: they have come upon _imponderable_ matters, like heat, light, &c., to which they might perhaps add space and time. These “imponderables,” which have lost the property (peculiar to matter) of gravity and, in a sense, even the capacity of offering resistance, have still, however, a sensible existence and outness of part to part; whereas the “vital”_ matter_, which may also be found enumerated among them, not merely lacks gravity, but even every other aspect of existence which might lead us to treat it as material. The fact is that in the Idea of Life the self-externalism of nature is _implicitly_ at an end: subjectivity is the very substance and conception of life—with this proviso, however, that its existence or objectivity is still at the same time forfeited to the sway of self-externalism. It is otherwise with Mind. There, in the intelligible unity which exists as freedom, as absolute negativity, and not as the immediate or natural individual, the object or the reality of the intelligible unity is the unity itself; and so the self-externalism, which is the fundamental feature of matter, has been completely dissipated and transmuted into universality, or the subjective ideality of the conceptual unity. Mind is the existent truth of matter—the truth that matter itself has no truth.
A cognate question is that of the _community of soul and body_. This community (interdependence) was assumed as a _fact_, and the only problem was how to _comprehend_ it. The usual answer, perhaps, was to call it an _incomprehensible_ mystery; and, indeed, if we take them to be absolutely antithetical and absolutely independent, they are as impenetrable to each other as one piece of matter to another, each being supposed to be found only in the pores of the other, i.e. where the other is not: whence Epicurus, when attributing to the gods a residence in the pores, was consistent in not imposing on them any connexion with the world. A somewhat different answer has been given by all philosophers since this relation came to be expressly discussed. Descartes, Malebranche, Spinoza, and Leibnitz have all indicated God as this _nexus_. They meant that the finitude of soul and matter were only ideal and unreal distinctions; and, so holding, these philosophers took God, not, as so often is done, merely as another word for the incomprehensible, but rather as the sole true identity of finite mind and matter. But either this identity, as in the case of Spinoza, is too abstract, or, as in the case of Leibnitz, though his Monad of monads brings things into being, it does so only by an act of judgment or choice. Hence, with Leibnitz, the result is a distinction between soul and the corporeal (or material), and the identity is only like the _copula_ of a judgment, and does not rise or develop into system, into the absolute syllogism.
§ 390. The Soul is at first— (_a_) In its immediate natural mode—the natural soul, which only _is_.
(_b_) Secondly, it is a soul which _feels_, as individualised, enters into correlation with its immediate being, and, in the modes of that being, retains an abstract independence.
(_c_) Thirdly, its immediate being—or corporeity—is moulded into it, and with that corporeity it exists as _actual_ soul.
(a) The Physical Soul(119).
§ 391. The soul universal, described, it may be, as an _anima mundi_, a world-soul, must not be fixed on that account as a single subject; it is rather the universal _substance_ which has its actual truth only in individuals and single subjects. Thus, when it presents itself as a single soul, it is a single soul which _is_ merely: its only modes are modes of natural life. These have, so to speak, behind its ideality a free existence: i.e. they are natural objects for consciousness, but objects to which the soul as such does not behave as to something external. These features rather are _physical qualities_ of which it finds itself possessed.
§ 392. While still a “substance” (i.e. a physical soul) the mind (1) takes part in the general planetary life, feels the difference of climates, the changes of the seasons and the periods of the day, &c. This life of nature for the main shows itself only in occasional strain or disturbance of mental tone.
In recent times a good deal has been said of the cosmical, sidereal, and telluric life of man. In such a sympathy with nature the animals essentially live: their specific characters and their particular phases of growth depend, in many cases completely, and always more or less, upon it.
In the case of man these points of dependence lose importance, just in proportion to his civilisation, and the more his whole frame of soul is based upon a substructure of mental freedom. The history of the world is not bound up with revolutions in the solar system, any more than the destinies of individuals with the positions of the planets.
The difference of climate has a more solid and vigorous influence. But the response to the changes of the seasons and hours of the day is found only in faint changes of mood, which come expressly to the fore only in morbid states (including insanity) and at periods when the self-conscious life suffers depression.
In nations less intellectually emancipated, which therefore live more in harmony with nature, we find amid their superstitions and aberrations of imbecility _a few_ real cases of such sympathy, and on that foundation what seems to be marvellous prophetic vision of coming conditions and of events arising therefrom. But as mental freedom gets a deeper hold, even these few and slight susceptibilities, based upon participation in the common life of nature, disappear. Animals and plants, on the contrary, remain for ever subject to such influences.
§ 393. (2) According to the concrete differences of the terrestrial globe, the general planetary life of the nature-governed mind specialises itself and breaks up into the several nature-governed minds which, on the whole, give expression to the nature of the geographical continents and constitute the diversities of _race_.
The contrast between the earth’s poles, the land towards the north pole being more aggregated and preponderant over sea, whereas in the southern hemisphere it runs out in sharp points, widely distant from each other, introduces into the differences of continents a further modification which Treviranus (_Biology_, Part II) has exhibited in the case of the flora and fauna.
§ 394. This diversity descends into specialities, that may be termed _local_ minds—shown in the outward modes of life and occupation, bodily structure and disposition, but still more in the inner tendency and capacity of the intellectual and moral character of the several peoples.
Back to the very beginnings of national history we see the several nations each possessing a persistent type of its own.
§ 395. (3) The soul is further de-universalised into the individualised subject. But this subjectivity is here only considered as a differentiation and singling out of the modes which nature gives; we find it as the special temperament, talent, character, physiognomy, or other disposition and idiosyncrasy, of families or single individuals.
(β) Physical Alterations.
§ 396. Taking the soul as an individual, we find its diversities, as alterations in it, the one permanent subject, and as stages in its development. As they are at once physical and mental diversities, a more concrete definition or description of them would require us to anticipate an acquaintance with the formed and matured mind.
The (1) first of these is the natural lapse of the ages in man’s life. He begins with _Childhood_—mind wrapt up in itself. His next step is the fully-developed antithesis, the strain and struggle of a universality which is still subjective (as seen in ideals, fancies, hopes, ambitions) against his immediate individuality. And that individuality marks both the world which, as it exists, fails to meet his ideal requirements, and the position of the individual himself, who is still short of independence and not fully equipped for the part he has to play (_Youth_). Thirdly, we see man in his true relation to his environment, recognising the objective necessity and reasonableness of the world as he finds it,—a world no longer incomplete, but able in the work which it collectively achieves to afford the individual a place and a security for his performance. By his share in this collective work he first is really _somebody_, gaining an effective existence and an objective value (_Manhood_). Last of all comes the finishing touch to this unity with objectivity: a unity which, while on its realist side it passes into the _inertia_ of deadening habit, on its idealist side gains freedom from the limited interests and entanglements of the outward present (_Old Age_).
§ 397. (2) Next we find the individual subject to a _real_ antithesis, leading it to seek and find _itself_ in _another_ individual. This—the _sexual relation_—on a physical basis, shows, on its one side, subjectivity remaining in an instinctive and emotional harmony of moral life and love, and not pushing these tendencies to an extreme _universal_ phase, in purposes political, scientific or artistic; and on the other, shows an active half, where the individual is the vehicle of a struggle of universal and objective interests with the given conditions (both of his own existence and of that of the external world), carrying out these universal principles into a unity with the world which is his own work.
The sexual tie acquires its moral and spiritual significance and function in the _family_.
§ 398. (3) When the individuality, or self-centralised being, distinguishes itself from its _mere_ being, this immediate judgment is the _waking_ of the soul, which confronts its self-absorbed natural life, in the first instance, as one natural quality and state confronts another state, viz. _sleep_.—The waking is not merely for the observer, or externally distinct from the sleep: it is itself the _judgment_ (primary partition) of the individual soul—which is self-existing only as it relates its self-existence to its mere existence, distinguishing itself from its still undifferentiated universality. The waking state includes generally all self-conscious and rational activity in which the mind realises its own distinct self.—Sleep is an invigoration of this activity—not as a merely negative rest from it, but as a return back from the world of specialisation, from dispersion into phases where it has grown hard and stiff,—a return into the general nature of subjectivity, which is the substance of those specialised energies and their absolute master.
The distinction between sleep and waking is one of those _posers_, as they may be called, which are often addressed to philosophy:—Napoleon, e.g., on a visit to the University of Pavia, put this question to the class of ideology. The characterisation given in the section is abstract; it primarily treats waking merely as a natural fact, containing the mental element _implicite_ but not yet as invested with a special being of its own. If we are to speak more concretely of this distinction (in fundamentals it remains the same), we must take the self-existence of the individual soul in its higher aspects as the Ego of consciousness and as intelligent mind. The difficulty raised anent the distinction of the two states properly arises, only when we also take into account the dreams in sleep and describe these dreams, as well as the mental representations in the sober waking consciousness, under one and the same title of mental representations. Thus superficially classified as states of mental representation the two coincide, because we have lost sight of the difference; and in the case of any assignable distinction of waking consciousness, we can always return to the trivial remark that all this is nothing more than mental idea. But the concrete theory of the waking soul in its realised being views it as _consciousness_ and _intellect_: and the world of intelligent consciousness is something quite different from a picture of mere ideas and images. The latter are in the main only externally conjoined, in an unintelligent way, by the laws of the so-called _Association of Ideas_; though here and there of course logical principles may also be operative. But in the waking state man behaves essentially as a concrete ego, an intelligence: and because of this intelligence his sense-perception stands before him as a concrete totality of features in which each member, each point, takes up its place as at the same time determined through and with all the rest. Thus the facts embodied in his sensation are authenticated, not by his mere subjective representation and distinction of the facts as something external from the person, but by virtue of the concrete interconnexion in which each part stands with all parts of this complex. The waking state is the concrete consciousness of this mutual corroboration of each single factor of its content by all the others in the picture as perceived. The consciousness of this interdependence need not be explicit and distinct. Still this general setting to all sensations is implicitly present in the concrete feeling of self.—In order to see the difference of dreaming and waking we need only keep in view the Kantian distinction between subjectivity and objectivity of mental representation (the latter depending upon determination through categories): remembering, as already noted, that what is actually present in mind need not be therefore explicitly realised in consciousness, just as little as the exaltation of the intellectual sense to God need stand before consciousness in the shape of proofs of God’s existence, although, as before explained, these proofs only serve to express the net worth and content of that feeling.
§ 399. Sleep and waking are, primarily, it is true, not mere alterations, but _alternating_ conditions (a progression _in infinitum_). This is their formal and negative relationship: but in it the _affirmative_ relationship is also involved. In the self-certified existence of waking soul its mere existence is implicit as an “ideal” factor: the features which make up its sleeping nature, where they are implicitly as in their substance, are _found_ by the waking soul, in its own self, and, be it noted, for itself.
The fact that these particulars, though as a mode of mind they are distinguished from the self-identity of our self-centred being, are yet simply contained in its simplicity, is what we call sensibility.
§ 400. Sensibility (feeling) is the form of the dull stirring, the inarticulate breathing, of the spirit through its unconscious and unintelligent individuality, where every definite feature is still “immediate,”—neither specially developed in its content nor set in distinction as objective to subject, but treated as belonging to its most special, its natural peculiarity. The content of sensation is thus limited and transient, belonging as it does to natural, immediate being,—to what is therefore qualitative and finite.
_Everything is in sensation_ (feeling): if you will, everything that emerges in conscious intelligence and in reason has its source and origin in sensation; for source and origin just means the first immediate manner in which a thing appears. Let it not be enough to have principles and religion only in the head: they must also be in the heart, in the feeling.
What we merely have in the head is in consciousness, in a general way: the facts of it are objective—set over against consciousness, so that as it is put in me (my abstract ego) it can also be kept away and apart from me (from my concrete subjectivity). But if put in the feeling, the fact is a mode of my individuality, however crude that individuality be in such a form: it is thus treated as my _very own_. My own is something inseparate from the actual concrete self: and this immediate unity of the soul with its underlying self in all its definite content is just this inseparability; which however yet falls short of the ego of developed consciousness, and still more of the freedom of rational mind-life. It is with a quite different intensity and permanency that the will, the conscience, and the character, are our very own, than can ever be true of feeling and of the group of feelings (the heart): and this we need no philosophy to tell us. No doubt it is correct to say that above everything the _heart_ must be good. But feeling and heart is not the form by which anything is legitimated as religious, moral, true, just, &c., and an appeal to heart and feeling either means nothing or means something bad.
This should hardly need enforcing. Can any experience be more trite than that feelings and hearts are also bad, evil, godless, mean, &c.? That the heart is the source only of such feelings is stated in the words: “From the heart proceed evil thoughts, murder, adultery, fornication, blasphemy, &c.” In such times when “scientific” theology and philosophy make the heart and feeling the criterion of what is good, moral, and religious, it is necessary to remind them of these trite experiences; just as it is nowadays necessary to repeat that thinking is the characteristic property by which man is distinguished from the beasts, and that he has feeling in common with them.
§ 401. What the sentient soul finds within it is, on one hand, the naturally immediate, as “ideally” in it and made its own. On the other hand and conversely, what originally belongs to the central individuality (which as further deepened and enlarged is the conscious ego and free mind) get the features of the natural corporeity, and is so felt. In this way we have two spheres of feeling. One, where what at first is a corporeal affection (e.g. of the eye or of any bodily part whatever) is made feeling (sensation) by being driven inward, memorised in the soul’s self-centred part. Another, where affections originating in the mind and belonging to it, are in order to be felt, and to be as if found, invested with corporeity. Thus the mode or affection gets a place in the subject: it is felt in the soul. The detailed specification of the former branch of sensibility is seen in the system of the senses. But the other or inwardly originated modes of feeling no less necessarily systematise themselves; and their corporisation, as put in the living and concretely developed natural being, works itself out, following the special character of the mental mode, in a special system of bodily organs.
Sensibility in general is the healthy fellowship of the individual mind in the life of its bodily part. The senses form the simple system of corporeity specified. (_a_) The “ideal” side of physical things breaks up into two—because in it, as immediate and not yet subjective ideality, distinction appears as mere variety—the senses of definite _light_, § 287—and of _sound_, § 300. The “real” aspect similarly is with its difference double: (_b_) the senses of smell and taste, §§ 321, 322; (_c_) the sense of solid reality, of heavy matter, of heat and shape. Around the centre of the sentient individuality these specifications arrange themselves more simply than when they are developed in the natural corporeity.
The system by which the internal sensation comes to give itself specific bodily forms would deserve to be treated in detail in a peculiar science—a _psychical physiology_. Somewhat pointing to such a system is implied in