The philosophic use of the term _sensation_ does not necessarily imply, what, in its popular use, is considered almost as involved in it; and perhaps, therefore, it may not be superfluous to warn you, that it is not confined to feelings, which are pleasurable or painful, but extends to every mental affection, that is the immediate consequence of impression on our organs of sense,--of which mental states or affections, many, and, as I am inclined to think, by far the greater number, are of a kind, that cannot be termed either agreeable or disagreeable. Of the objects of sight, for example, which are of such very frequent occurrence, how _few_ are there, at which we look, either with pleasure or with pain,--if we except that indirect pleasure, which, in particular cases, they may afford, as communicating to us information, that is valuable in itself, or as gratifying even our idlest curiosity. To take one of the most striking cases of this sort,--though we may derive, from the perusal of a work that interests us, the purest delight, it is a delight, resulting only from the conceptions, which the author, in consequence of the happy contrivance of symbolic characters, has been able to transfuse, as it were, from his own mind into ours; but, during all the time of the perusal, sensations, almost innumerable, have been excited in us, by the separate characters, with which the pages are covered, that have never mingled even the faintest direct pleasure, with the general emotion, which they, and they alone, have indirectly produced.