Page:Calcutta Review (1925) Vol. 16.djvu/254

1925] us no insight into the nature of energy. But it is unnecessary to enter here into its contradictions. It is impossible that we could have any awareness of being acted on by things and affected passively, without a consciousness of reacting by putting forth energy to resist and change things. And further, we could not know that there are any other things if we had not the active consciousness of resisting and acting on them. Acting and being acted on are reciprocal facts, neither of which can be, without the other. If we ask what it is that gives to these fleeting states of feeling the unity of a single mind, we shall probably be referred to the body and brain as giving to mental states the unity and connection required to make them to be one mind. But as the theory limits knowledge to feeling, it leaves us no bridge to the existence of material things existing behind feeling. In short, the feeling-theory leaves us with an altogether incoherent conception of both world and mind. We must then consider the theory—

II. That Intellect is the essential constituent of mind, and thinking therefore, the essence of the Self—the view now called Intellectualism. The feeling-theory is founded on one fundamental oversight—it overlooks the fact that feeling is always a feeling of something, i.e., that it is accompanied by a consciousness that the feeling consists in the Self’s being affected by something and therefore includes an awareness of something other than the Self which feels, and therefore a distinction between the Self which feels and a something which is felt. In other words, feeling contains an element of cognition, viz., a cognition of Self as having the feeling, and of something else as imposing it. Thus sensations of touch, sound, etc., are accompanied by a cognition of an external world of solid things as the ground of these sensations; and emotions of fear, anger, pity, by awareness of other things as occasioning these feelings in us. This