The system by which the internal sensation comes to give itself specific
bodily forms would deserve to be treated in detail in a peculiar science—a
_psychical physiology_. Somewhat pointing to such a system is implied in
the feeling of the appropriateness or inappropriateness of an immediate
sensation to the persistent tone of internal sensibility (the pleasant and
unpleasant): as also in the distinct parallelism which underlies the
symbolical employment of sensations, e.g. of colours, tones, smells. But
the most interesting side of a psychical physiology would lie in studying
not the mere sympathy, but more definitely the bodily form adopted by
certain mental modifications, especially the passions or emotions. We
should have, e.g., to explain the line of connexion by which anger and
courage are felt in the breast, the blood, the “irritable” system, just as
thinking and mental occupation are felt in the head, the centre of the
’sensible’ system. We should want a more satisfactory explanation than
hitherto of the most familiar connexions by which tears, and voice in
general, with its varieties of language, laughter, sighs, with many other
specialisations lying in the line of pathognomy and physiognomy, are
formed from their mental source. In physiology the viscera and the organs
are treated merely as parts subservient to the animal organism; but they
form at the same time a physical system for the expression of mental
states, and in this way they get quite another interpretation.
§ 402. Sensations, just because they are immediate and are found existing,
are single and transient aspects of psychic life,—alterations in the
substantiality of the soul, set in its self-centred life, with which that
substance is one. But this self-centred being is not merely a formal
factor of sensation: the soul is virtually a reflected totality of
sensations—it feels _in itself_ the total substantiality which it
_virtually_ is—it is a soul which feels.
In the usage of ordinary language, sensation and feeling are not clearly
distinguished: still we do not speak of the sensation,—but of the feeling
(sense) of right, of self; sentimentality (sensibility) is connected with
sensation: we may therefore say sensation emphasises rather the side of
passivity—the fact that we find ourselves feeling, i.e. the immediacy of
mode in feeling—whereas feeling at the same time rather notes the fact
that it is _we ourselves_ who feel.
(b) The Feeling Soul.—(Soul as Sentiency.)(122)
§ 403. The feeling or sentient individual is the simple “ideality” or
subjective side of sensation. What it has to do, therefore, is to raise
its substantiality, its merely virtual filling-up, to the character of
subjectivity, to take possession of it, to realise its mastery over its
own. As sentient, the soul is no longer a mere natural, but an inward,
individuality: the individuality which in the merely substantial totality
was only formal to it has to be liberated and made independent.