Page:Ferrier Works vol 2 1888 LECTURES IN GREEK PHILOSOPHY.pdf/280

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SOCRATES.
225

cannot, feel it as affecting me or any one except yourself. In thinking it you can think it as the pain of yesterday or to-morrow; but you do not, cannot, feel it except as the pain of the present time. Again, in thinking, you can think it as pain in Edinburgh or in London; but you cannot feel it except in the place where it is, namely, in your own organism. I have said that in thinking the pain you can think other cases of the same or similar pains. I now say that you not only can, but you must, do this if you really think the pain. The very essence of thinking consists in having more before the mind than the case more ostensibly present to it. The instant you think the pain, you do, and must, in that act, think other cases (potential cases they may be) of the same. Thought cannot, by any possibility, be held fast to one singular instance of a thing, whether that thing be a pain, a pleasure, a material object, or anything else. If it were or could be so bound, it would not be thought, but feeling. When you look at a chair, so long as you have merely a sensation of it, your sensation is a sensation of that particular chair, and of nothing else. Such a state of mind is scarcely conceivable; but we may conceive it to be the predicament in which our domestic animals are placed when they contemplate our household furniture. Such a state of the human mind, I say, is hardly conceivable, because in looking at a chair we instantly think it. But in thinking it what do we do? We think not only it, but much besides. We think it as one of