Page:Home Education by Isaac Taylor (1838).djvu/203

. It is not quite certain that we can at all think of even the most familiar and pungent tastes and smells, entirely abstracted from the usual visible accompaniments of these sensations. Cayenne pepper affects the tongue much more vividly than its bright colour does the eye but in attempting to think of this acrid condiment, its visible appearance prevails entirely over the feeble traces left upon the mind by the taste; and I can mentally see it, much sooner than mentally taste it.

It is the same in degree, though not so completely, with muscular sensations, with the sensations of touch, and with our visceral consciousness. Severe pain, entirely as it engrosses the mind when present, can only be very dimly remembered; and we must, in this instance, admire the beneficent constitution of our nature; for if sensations of pain, visceral or muscular, returned upon the mind with a vividness proportioned to that which belongs to the objects of sight, our lives, after having once suffered any extreme anguish, would be a perpetual torture. Very few of the objects of sight are in themselves, and in a positive manner painful.

The sensations of hearing come next, as to their relation to the conceptive power. No sensations are better defined, none are retained in their full peculiarity longer; and they unquestionably fall under the control of the mind, so as to be readily recovered by a mental effort, or quest, and without any accompanying aid from the voice, as a man hums a tune, to regain the idea of it; for we think of the tone of the voices of our dear friends, long absentof the sound of popular acclamationsof thunderof the singing of birdsof the ticking of a clock, as heard during the darkness and stillness of the night ; and especially, musical persons can, without any audible aid, mentally repeat an air, or even a complicated harmony.

Yet it is the sensations of sight, that is to say, not its