excites in the mind can affect it no otherwise than any similar impression produced by any other body must do. Afterwards, no doubt, the visible image comes in to confirm and give distinctness to the imperfect conclusions of the other sense[1].
It is by comparing the knowledge that I have of my own impressions, ideas, feelings, powers, &c., with my knowledge of the same or similar impressions, ideas, &c., in others, and with the still more imperfect conception that I form of what passes in their minds when this is supposed to be essentially different from what passes in my own, that I acquire the general notion of self. If I had no idea of what passes in the minds of others, or if my ideas of their feelings and perceptions were perfect representations, i. e. mere conscious repetitions of them, all proper personal distinction would be lost either in pure self-love, or in perfect universal sympathy. In the one case it would be impossible for me to prefer myself to others, as I should be the sole object of my own consciousness; and in the other case I must love all others as myself, because I should then be nothing more than part of a whole, of which all others
- ↑ I remember a story somewhere in the Arabian Nights of a man with a silver thigh. Why may not a fable serve for an illustration as well as any thing else? Metaphysics themselves are but a dry romance. Now suppose this thigh to have been endued with a power of sensation and to have answered every other purpose of a real thigh. What difference would this make in its outward appearance either to the man himself or to any one else? Or how by means of sight would he know it to be his thigh, more than it really was? It would still look just like what it did, a silver thigh and nothing more. It's impression on the eye would not depend on it's being a sensible substance, on it's having life in it, or being connected with the same conscious principle as the eye, but on it's being a visible substance, that is having extension, figure, and colour.
