ing a brain and nerve communicating, I am engrossed with properties exclusively belonging to the object or material world; I am at that moment (except by very rapid transitions or alternations) unable to conceive a truly mental fact, my truly mental consciousness. Our mental experience, our feelings and thoughts, have no extension, no place, no form or outline, no mechanical division of parts; and we are incapable of attending to any thing mental until we shut off the view of all that. Walking in the country in spring, our mind is occupied with the foliage, the bloom, and the grassy meads, all purely objective things; we are suddenly and strongly arrested by the odor of the May-blossom; we give way for a moment to the sensation of sweetness: for that moment the objective regards cease; we think of nothing extended; we are in a state where extension has no footing; there is, to us, place no longer. Such states are of short duration, mere fits, glimpses; they are constantly shifted and alternated with object states, but while they last and have their full power we are in a different world; the material world is blotted out, eclipsed, for the instant unthinkable. These subject-moments are studied to advantage in bursts of intense pleasure, or intense pain, in fits of engrossed reflection, especially reflection upon mental facts; but they are seldom sustained in purity beyond a very short interval; we are constantly returning to the object-side of things—
