Page:Ferrier Works vol 2 1888 LECTURES IN GREEK PHILOSOPHY.pdf/281

226 a number of chairs, either actual or possible chairs, it does not matter which. It is a specimen of what may be before the mind again, and again, and again; and not only that—those things of which the present chair is a type or instance, and which I have denoted by the words again, and again, and again these things are, in some sort, actually present to the mind along with the chair which is before it, although it is very difficult to say in what way they are present to it. This at any rate is certain, that to regard the chair as a type of other chairs, to view it as one of a class, as a specimen of which more examples are possible, this is to think it. This is what the mind does, and must do, in thinking anything, whether its object be a material thing or a sensation of pleasure or pain, or anything else whatsoever. The mind is always occupied with more than that particular thing, and in this respect thinking is diametrically different from feeling, which is never occupied with more than the particular sensation present. To think is to have the mind occupied with a thing and a class.

12. We are very apt in ordinary discourse to use the words thought and feeling as synonymous, and thus to confound the processes which each respectively expresses. For example, a man says, I feel a pain to-day similar to one which I felt yesterday; and in speaking thus he seems to himself to feel a resemblance between the two pains. But in that supposition he is completely mistaken. It is