Page:Herschel - A Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy (1831).djvu/19

 falls back on itself in utter hopelessness of arriving at an end.

(3.) When from external objects he turns his view upon himself, on his own vital and intellectual faculties, he finds that he possesses a power of examining and analysing his own nature to a certain extent, but no farther. In his corporeal frame he is sensible of a power to communicate a certain moderate amount of motion to himself and other objects; that this power depends on his will, and that its exertion can be suspended or increased at pleasure within certain limits; but how his will acts on his limbs he has no consciousness: and whence he derives the power he thus exercises, there is nothing to assure him, however he may long to know. His senses, too, inform him of a multitude of particulars respecting the external world, and he perceives an apparatus by which impressions from without may be transmitted, as a sort of signals to the interior of his person, and ultimately to his brain, wherein he is obscurely sensible that the thinking, feeling, reasoning being he calls himself, more especially resides; but by what means he becomes conscious of these impressions, and what is the nature of the immediate communication between that inward sentient being, and that machinery, his outward man, he has not the slightest conception.

(4.) Again, when he contemplates still more attentively the thoughts, acts, and passions of this his sentient intelligent self, he finds, indeed, that he can remember, and by the aid of memory can compare and discriminate, can judge and resolve, and, above all, that he is irresistibly impelled, from