We then opened our eyes, as it were on the great field of thought and passion, and on all the infinite variety of feelings, which, in assemblages more or less complex, and in colours more or less brilliant or obscure, it is every moment presenting to our internal glance. The very attempt to arrange these transient feelings as phenomena of the mind, however, implies evidently some consideration of the nature of that varied consciousness in which they consist, and of the identity of the permanent substance, as _states_ of _which_ we arrange them. My last Lecture, therefore, was devoted to this primary consideration of _consciousness_,--which we found reason to regard, not as any separate and peculiar faculty of the mind, of which our various feelings are, to use Dr Reid's expression, _objects_, and which is, therefore, to be added, in every instance, to the separate pleasures, pains, perceptions, remembrances, passions, that constitute the momentary states of the mind,--but merely as a short general term, expressive of all these momentary states in reference to the permanent subject _mind_. The sensation of fragrance, for example, is the consciousness of one moment, as the remembrance of that sensation, or some other sensation, is, perhaps, the consciousness of the succeeding moment;--the mind, at every moment, existing in one precise state, which, as one state can be accurately denoted only by one precise name, or by names that are synonymous, not by names that are significant of total diversity.