of observation extends, they continually open upon him in increasing
abundance; and that as the study of one prepares him to understand and
appreciate another, refinement follows on refinement, wonder on wonder,
till his faculties become bewildered in admiration, and his intellect
falls back on itself in utter hopelessness of arriving at an end.
(3.) When from external objects he turns his view upon himself, on his
own vital and intellectual faculties, he finds that he possesses a
power of examining and analysing his own nature to a certain extent,
but no farther. In his corporeal frame he is sensible of a power to
communicate a certain moderate amount of motion to himself and other
objects; that this power depends on his will, and that its exertion
can be suspended or increased at pleasure within certain limits; but
_how_ his will acts on his limbs he has no consciousness: and whence he
derives the power he thus exercises, there is nothing to assure him,
however he may long to know. His senses, too, inform him of a multitude
of particulars respecting the external world, and he perceives an
apparatus by which impressions from without may be transmitted, as a
sort of signals to the interior of his person, and ultimately to his
brain, wherein he is obscurely sensible that the thinking, feeling,
reasoning being he calls _himself_, more especially resides; but by
what means he becomes conscious of these impressions, and what is the
nature of the immediate communication between that inward sentient
being, and that machinery, his outward man, he has not the slightest
conception.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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