The poet pursues the investigation and makes a pointed distinction; he not only recovers “sensations sweet,” but “feelings, too, of unremembered pleasure.” Very few persons are capable of discriminating between the sensations and the feelings produced by an image recovered by some train of association. Wordsworth’s psychology is not only delicately nice, but very just, and the distinction he draws is important to the educator. The truth is “the feelings” are out of fashion at present; _The Man of Feeling_ is a person of no account; if he still exists he keeps in the shade, being aware, through a certain quickness of perception which belongs to him, that any little efflorescence proper to his character would be promptly reduced to pulp by the application of a sledge hammer. _The Man of Feeling_ has himself to thank for this; he allowed his feelings to become fantastic; his sweet sensibilities ran away with him; he meant pathos and talked bathos; he became an exaggerated type, and in self-preservation Society always cut off the offending limb, so _The Man of Feeling_ is no more. Nor is this the only charge that “the feelings” have to sustain. So long as the feelings remain objective they are, like the bloom to the peach, the last perfection of a beautiful character; but when they become subjective, when every feeling concerns itself with the _ego_, we have, as in the case of sensations, morbid conditions set up; the person begins by being “over sensitive,” hysteria supervenes, perhaps melancholia, an utterly spoilt life. George Eliot has a fine figure which aptly illustrates this subjective condition of the feelings. She tells us that a philosophic friend had pointed out to her that whereas the surface of a mirror or of a steel plate may be covered with minute scratches going in every direction, if you hold a lighted candle to the surface all these random scratches appear to arrange themselves and radiate from the central flame: just so with the person whose feelings have been permitted to minister to his egoistic consciousness: all things in heaven and earth are “felt” as they affect his own personality. What are the feelings? Perhaps they are best expressed in Coleridge’s phrase of “a vague appetency of the mind”; and we may do something to clear our thoughts by a negative examination. The feelings are _not_ sensations, because they have no necessary connection with the senses; they are to be distinguished from the two great affections (of love and justice) because they are not actively exercised upon any objects; they are distinct from the desires because they demand no gratification; and they are distinguishable from the intellectual operations which we call thought, because while thought proceeds from an idea, is active, and arrives at a result, the feelings arise from perceptions, are passive, and not definitely progressive.