{223} CHAPTER V. CONSCIOUSNESS. "It is not easy for the mind to put off those confused notions and prejudices it has imbibed from custom, inadvertency, and common conversation. It requires pains and assiduity to examine its ideas, till it resolves them into those clear and distinct simple ones out of which they are compounded; and to see which, amongst its simple ones, have or have not a necessary connexion and dependence one upon another. Till a man doth this in the primary and original notions of things, he builds upon floating and uncertain principles, and will often find himself at a loss."--_Locke_, _Hum. Und._ b. ii. c. 13. s. 28. IT will now be instructive to retrace our steps, to look back upon the space we have passed, and contemplate the progress we have made toward our journey's end. We have become acquainted with the elementary feelings of our nature; _first_, those derived immediately from our bodies, whether by impressions made on the surface of them, or unseen causes operating on them within; _secondly_, the feelings which, after the above mentioned feelings have ceased, are capable of existing as copies or representatives of them. We have also observed the manner in which those _secondary_ Feelings, to which we have given the name of IDEAS, flow, either into _groups_, or into _trains_. And {224} we have explored the system of contrivances, to which mankind have had recourse, for MARKING those feelings, and the trains of them; so as either to fix the knowledge of them for one's own use, or to make communication of them to others. In what has been thus already presented, it will be seen that several expositions of considerable importance are included. Sensations, and Ideas, are both feelings. When we have a sensation we feel, or have a feeling; when we have an idea we feel, or have a feeling. Having a SENSATION, and having a feeling, are not two things. The thing is one, the names only are two. I am pricked by a pin. The sensation is one; but I may call it sensation, or a feeling, or a pain, as I please. Now, when, having the sensation, I say I feel the sensation, I only use a tautological expression: the sensation is not one thing, the feeling another; the sensation is the feeling. When, instead of the word feeling, I use the word conscious, I do exactly the same thing, I merely use a tautological expression. To say I feel a sensation, is merely to say I feel a feeling; which is an impropriety of speech. And to say I am conscious of a feeling, is merely to say that I feel it. To have a feeling is to be conscious; and to be conscious is to have a feeling. To be conscious of the prick of the pin, is merely to have the sensation. And though I have these various modes of naming my sensation, by saying, I feel the prick of a pin, I feel the pain of a prick, I have the sensation of a prick, I have the feeling of a prick, I am conscious of the feeling; the thing named in all these various ways is one and the same.