Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind — John Stuart Mill — John Shaqi
Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind
John Stuart Mill · en
The first is to take them in the order of Intellectual development.
Some of the senses are evidently intellectual in a high degree, as
Sight and Hearing, others are intellectual in a much smaller degree,
as Smell and Taste. The organic sensations are still less connected
with the operations of the intellect. Many of the least intellectual
sensations are remarkably intense, as pleasure and pain; perhaps
more so than the intellectually higher class. The organic pains are
more unendurable than the worst pains of hearing or of sight, unless
these are assimilated to the other class, by injury of the organs.
The intellectual superiority of the higher senses shows itself in
two ways, the one strictly in the domain of Intellect, the other in
the domain of Feeling. As regards Intellect, it is shown in the
predominance of the ideas of the higher senses. Our intellectual or
ideal trains, the materials of thought and knowledge, are made up
most of all of ideas of sight, next of ideas of hearing, to a less
degree of ideas of touch or skin contact, and, least of all, of
ideas of stomach and lung sensations or other organic states. The
trains of the scientific man, of the man of business, and even of
the handicraft worker, are almost entirely made up of ideas of sight
and of hearing (with active or muscular ideas). Our understanding of
the order of nature, our very notion of the material universe, is a
vast and complex scheme of ideas of sight.
The intellectual superiority of the higher senses in the domain of
Feeling is connected with the remembrance or ideal persistence of
pleasures and pains. The pleasures of Digestion are weakly and
ineffectively remembered, in the absence of the actuality. The
pleasures of Smell are remembered better. The pleasures and pains of
Hearing and Sight are remembered best of any. This gives them a
higher value in life; the addition made to the actual, by the ideal,
is, in their case, the greatest of all. They are said, for this
among other reasons, to be more refined.
The arrangement dictated by the gradation of intellectuality would
be as follows:--1. Sensations of Organic Life. 2. Taste. 3. Smell.
4. Touch. 5. Hearing. 6. Sight.
The second principle of arrangement starts with Touch, as the most
simple in its mode of action, and the most diffused in its
operation. Touch consists in mere mechanical pressure on a sensitive
surface; this is the most simple and elementary of all stimuli. The
other senses are regarded as specialised modifications of Touch.