§ II.—CHAPTER X.

SENSATION—DIVINE GOODNESS.

THE phenomena of sensation form in all cases the lowest range of mental life, while in many of the inferior races this life reaches no farther. There are some, indeed, to whom it may seem strange to speak of mind as expressed in mere sensation. But we have no other name by which to denote that higher element or presence beyond mere organic life, which sense, even in its lowest stages, implies. That which feels is everywhere something more than that which merely lives. Sense is only such in virtue of a sentient subject, which we can only conceive intelligibly, even in the brute creation, as the dim, crude, and frequently unawakened presence of mind. It is necessary, at the same time, that we carefully preserve the distinction of mind, as possessed by man, in its fully-expressed reality of reason. Any doubt on this point would leave our argument, or indeed any theistic argument, in a somewhat hopeless state of confusion and uncertainty.

With this explanation, a mental presence is to be held as 187everywhere manifested in sensation. With every sensitive act there is ever, according to Sir William Hamilton,¹⁰⁶¹⁰⁶   Vide Appendix to Reid’s Works, p. 878. a distinct forthputting of mental activity. A certain attitude of attention, blind as it may be, is necessary to constitute such an act; and hence it happens that, when attention is otherwise wholly absorbed, the mental life otherwise wholly engrossed, we can sustain the most severe bodily injuries without any feeling of pain.

Sensations admit of an obvious classification in relation to the different organs on which they depend. In man they are commonly reckoned in a five-fold series, as the sensations of taste, smell, touch, hearing, and sight. It is, nevertheless, now almost universally admitted that this classification is not complete. Dr T. Brown contended for a sixth sense, under the name of the muscular sense, to which he traced various feelings generally ascribed to touch; and it cannot be doubted that there is a separate range of sensations of which our muscular frame is the appropriate organ. As this frame is tense or relaxed, as it moves rhythmically or convulsively (in shuddering, for example), or again, as it is vigorous or exhausted, it gives forth various impressions which enter into the sensory system, and form a large share of our daily sensational experience. In the very same manner the different affections flowing from the constant processes of vegetative life—those, for example, arising from a state of healthiness or disease, vigour or debility—and other affections still less defined, may very well claim to be ranked as distinct orders of sensations. It cannot be doubted that 188the feelings connected with such states of the bodily organisation, however diffused, make a large portion of the common consciousness, and of the happiness or misery of our common mental existence. It is not necessary for our purpose, however, to determine such matters of purely psychological classification.

Of the five more specially recognised senses, taste and smell are rightly grouped by themselves; and again, hearing and sight stand in a similar group. Touch stands by itself, as in some respects the most important and necessary of all our senses.

Taste and smell are intimately allied: they both convey impressions derived from the chemical qualities of bodies, the one in the fluid (substances tasted must be either naturally fluid, or must be dissolved by the saliva), the other in the gaseous state. They are chiefly instrumental as subserving the more physical wants of existence; and smell, from its subservience in this point of view, is well known to reach a much more intense and powerful development in some of the lower animals than in man.

The senses of sight and hearing are more intellectual in their character and relations than the former. They carry the mind more outward, fixing it more upon the object awakening its regard. The former, as has been often pointed out, is more immediately related to the cognitive, the latter to the emotional powers, a relation which is thus curiously contrasted in a passage quoted by Mr Morell from Erdmann’s Psychologische Briefe. “The one,” says Erdman, “is the clearest, the other is the deepest of the senses. 189The same contrast shows itself in the objects by which these organs are severally affected. In the former case the object shows its outward surface, as it exists unmoved in space; in the latter case it betrays, by means of the tone it gives forth, what exists within and under the surface. It is not the form and colour of an object which tells what it is, but its sound. For that reason the sight of a thing does not penetrate so much to the heart, it only tells us what is its appearance. On the other hand, the tone moves us; it tells us how the thing or the person stands to the heart itself. On that account we can easily explain the phenomena so often observed, that deafness is hard and distrustful, while blindness is mild and confiding.”¹⁰⁷¹⁰⁷   Psychology, pp. 113, 114.

The sense of touch is peculiar in its range and the diversity of its applications. This extent and variety of operation constitute its importance and rank in comparison with the other senses; for, in point of mere intellectual dignity and refinement, it must certainly be classed below the sense of vision. It is the same characteristic which has led to that subdivision of its functions to which Dr T. Brown led the way, many separating with him the more objective phenomena of the sense, through which we are supposed to come to a clear knowledge of the primary qualities of matter—extension, solidity, hardness, &c.—from the more subjective phenomena, or those of feeling, strictly so called; and others ranging in a further separate class the sensations of temperature, usually considered to form merely a variety of those of touch.

In the operation of these different senses, the unerring accuracy with which they guide the inferior orders in the selection of fitting nourishment, and their rich and varying, yet so nicely discriminating flow in man, we see the bright manifestations of the same provident wisdom which we have hitherto been tracing. Marvellously complex and beautiful as are the higher organs of hearing and sight, they must yet surely yield in endless intricacy of harmonious adjustment to the crowding sensations to which they minister. If the hand of a transcendent Wisdom be visible in the arrangements of the one, must it not be also impressively recognised in the yet subtler arrangements of the other?

But it is not for the evidence of design, that may beyond doubt be here equally traced, that these phenomena possess a special interest for the Theist. Their peculiar significance consists not in the fact that in them also we see wisdom, but that in them, for the first time, we perceive goodness. In this new reality of creation we have a new testimony to the Creator. With the dawn of sense, we have the kindling of the light of love around the great First Cause. We behold no longer a merely exquisite mechanism, nor even the elaborately beautiful action of unconscious life, but the yet higher and richer workings of sentient being. In these workings there emerges for the first time the fact of enjoyment, and this fact in nature it is which alone enables us inductively to find goodness in God. Apart from this fact, Paley has said, with his wonted brief simplicity, “the attribute has no object, the term has no meaning.” It is only the presence of a sentient subject in organism which enables 191us to pronounce that the tendency of its design is beneficial. It is only its relation to consciousness which makes anything good or evil.

It becomes, then, for the theistic inference, a most vital and momentous—question Is enjoyment really the normal expression of sensation? Is happiness the prevailing response of consciousness? Is it, in short, “a happy world, after all? “What is the testimony which sentient life, in its manifold forms, utters on this great point? The true bearing of the question is to be carefully observed. It is not at all a question implying the non-existence of evil; on the contrary, it proceeds plainly on the supposition of evil being an undoubted reality. The truth is, that with the fact of pleasure, given in sensation, there emerges so inseparably the fact of pain—the one fact so directly suggests the other—that the induction as to the Divine goodness assumes, from the very first, a directly polemical aspect. It becomes a question in a different sense from the truth of the Divine power or wisdom; and we are so far from wishing to hide from view the obvious difficulty which thus meets us, that we frankly admit it in our very mode of stating the matter. While acknowledging the difficulty, however, we reserve it, according to the well-devised plan of our subject, for separate and special treatment. Pain is present along with pleasure—evil along with good; and it will be our subsequent aim to consider the solution of which this fact is capable. In the mean time, we simply inquire, Is not happiness present to such a degree in creation as to lead us to infer in the Creator a disposition to bestow happiness? Is 192not good so apparent in nature as to declare that its Author is good? Or—to place the matter before us in the strictly special form in which it has occurred in this chapter—is not the normal action of sense, enjoyment?

To the question thus put we can only imagine one answer. When, with a clear mind and heart, we turn to nature, we see happiness expressing itself in endlessly multiplied forms. The play of conscious life is everywhere around us, and it is the play of enjoyment. Every one is familiar with the felicitous passage of Paley, descriptive of this prevailing happiness of sentient existence; and whatever shadows may lie in the background—obvious objections to which we have already adverted,—there cannot well be any dispute as to the truth as well as felicity of the Archdeacon’s picture on the positive side. It cannot be rationally doubted that pleasure is the appropriate correlative of sensation everywhere. The natural meaning of feeling, so to speak, is happiness. Feeling is no doubt also liable to be pain; but—and this alone is the point of our present argument—pain is the exception, pleasure the rule. If a nerve be lacerated, it will unquestionably give forth a sensation of pain; but the expression of the nervous system is nevertheless, in all animals, according to its originally constituted working—or in other words, when not interfered with—pleasure. And this is what we intend by speaking of the normal action of sensation as pleasurable. The constitution of animal life is such that it yields, in harmonious operation, enjoyment. The design, therefore, of that constitution is clearly benevolent, even if it were, in 193the actual circumstances of the case, more liable to interference than it is. In truth, however, it is not only designed to evolve happiness, but so secured in its working that the design is for the most part effectually accomplished.

Happiness ascends million-voiced to the great Source of Being day by day. It is a living, if often inarticulate speech, diffused through creation, and warming it everywhere with the breath of thanksgiving. It is a song of natural piety which is new every morning, and fails not every evening, although many jars mingle in the wide-toned benedicite. These mar the harmony of the song, but it still goes upwards, a pervading strain of happiness, in testimony of the Love from which it comes, and in which alone it lives.