Page:Essays on the Principles of Human Action (1835).djvu/185

 fraction in whole numbers. The two things are incompatible. As to any thing like conscious individuality, i. e. that which assigneth limits to our ideas we know they have it not.

3. I would observe that ideas, as far as they are distinct and particular, seem to involve a greater contradiction than when they are confused and general. For, in proportion to their distinctness, must be the number of different acts of the mind excited at the same time; i. e. in proportion to the individuality of the image or idea, if I may so express myself, the thought ceases to be individual, inasmuch as the simplicity of the attention is thus necessarily broken and divided into a number of different actions, which yet are all united in the same conscious feeling, or there could be no connection between them. How then we should ever be able to conceive of things distinctly, clearly, and particularly, seems the wonder: not how different impressions acting at once on the mind should be confused, and as it were massed together, in a general feeling, for want of sufficient activity in the intellectual faculties to give form and a distinct place to all that throng of objects which at all times solicit the attention. Let any one make the experiment of counting a flock of sheep driven fast by him, and he will soon find his imagination unable to keep pace with the rapid succession of objects, and his idea of particular number slide into the general idea of multitude; not that because there are more objects than he possibly can count, he will think there are many, or that the word flock will present to his mind a mere name, without any particulars corresponding to it. Every act of the attention, every object we see or think of, presents a proof of the same kind.

4. I conceive that the mind has not been fairly dealt