The author of the Analysis often insists on the important doctrine that we have many feelings, both of the physical and of the mental class, which, either because they are permanent and unchangeable, or for the contrary reason, that they are extremely fugitive and evanescent, and are at the same time uninteresting to us except for the mental processes they originate, we form the habit of not attending to; and this habit, after a time, grows into an incapacity; we become unable to attend to them, even if we wish. In such cases we are usually not aware that we have had the feelings; yet the author seems to be of opinion that we really have them. He says, for example, in the section on Muscular Sensations (ch. i. sect. vii.) "We know that the air is continually pressing upon our bodies. But the sensation being continual, without any call to attend to it, we lose from habit, the power of doing so. The sensation is as if it did not exist." Is it not the most reasonable supposition that the sensation does not exist; that the necessary condition of sensation is change; that an unchanging sensation, instead of becoming latent, dwindles in intensity, until it dies away, and ceases to be a sensation? Mr. Bain expresses this mental law by saying, that a necessary condition of Consciousness is change; that we are conscious only of changes of state. I apprehend that change is necessary to consciousness of feeling, only because it is necessary to feeling: when there is no change, there is, not a permanent feeling of which we are unconscious, but no feeling at all. In the concluding chapter of Mr. Bain's great work, there is an enumeration of the various senses in which the word Consciousness is used. He finds them no fewer than thirteen.--_Ed._] {233} CHAPTER VI. CONCEPTION. "The generalizations of language are already made for us, before we have ourselves begun to generalize; and our mind receives the abstract phrases without any definite analysis, almost as readily as it receives and adopts the simple names of persons and things. The separate co-existing phenomena, and the separate sequences of a long succession of words, which it has been found convenient to comprehend in a single word, are hence, from the constant use of that single word, regarded by the mind almost in the same manner, as if they were only one phenomenon, or one event."--_Inquiry into the Relation of Cause and Effect_. _By Thomas Brown, M.D._ Note M, p. 567. THE philosophers, who erected CONSCIOUSNESS into what they called a Power of the mind, have bestowed the same rank upon CONCEPTION.