Elements of mental Author:George Payne Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. THE TRUE NATURE OP THE POWERS AND SUSCEPTIBILITIES OF THE MIND EXPLAINED. The phenomena of mind, or its varied thoughts and feelings, comp... more »rise, as we have seen, everything, in relation to it, of which we can obtain any knowledge. It will be desirable, therefore, to endeavour to ascertain what is the notion we ought to form of these phenomena. The body possesses various members, distinct from each other, though they form unitedly one beautiful and perfect whole. And hence it is possible to lose one of the bodily members while the others remain, or to put one in motion while the others continue at rest. From our proneness to reason analogically, we are apt to transfer the same mode of thinking to the mind; to conceive that it consists of various powers, as the body is composed of different members, each of which is distinct from the others, as well as from the mind itself, and capable of existing apart from the rest, or of perishing while its associate powers remain hi being, and in vigour. A little reflection will, however, convince us that some at least of these notions are utterly inconsistent with our conceptions of mind as a simple indivisible essence. It will remind us that, as the 111iin 1 does not, like the body, consist of parts, no analogy borrowed from the latter will apply here; that the powers of perceiving, feeling, judging,« less