The various forms of feeling--its specialization: (_a_)
touch, the feeling of mere limits, the indifferent
external independence of the organism and its
surroundings; (_b_) taste, feeling of the external object
when it is undergoing dissolution by assimilation; (_c_)
smell, the feeling of chemical dissolution in general;
(_d_) hearing, the feeling of the resistance of bodies
against attacks: sound being vibration caused by elastic
reaction against attacks on cohesion; (_e_) seeing, the
feeling of objects in their independence, without
dissolution or attack; plant life, nutrition, a process in
which the individuality is not preserved either in time or
in space; animal life, as feeling, preserves its
individuality as regards space, but not as regards time.
Having noted these important characteristics of the lower orders of
life, and found that _reaction_ from the part against the whole--from
the internal against the external--belongs to plant life and animal
life, we may now briefly mention the ways in which feeling is
particularized. In the lower animals it is only the feeling of touch; in
higher organisms it becomes also localized as seeing, hearing, taste,
and smell. These forms of sense-perception constitute a scale (as it
were) of feeling. With touch, there is reproduction of externality, but
the ideality of the reproduction is not so complete as in the other
forms. With taste, the feeling cognizes the external object as
undergoing dissolution, and assimilation within its own organism. We
taste only what we are beginning to destroy by the first process of
assimilation--that of eating. In smell, we perceive chemical dissolution
of bodies. In seeing and hearing, we have the forms of _ideal_
sensibility. Hearing perceives the attack made on the individuality of
an external thing, and its reaction in vibrations, which reveal to us
its internal nature--its cohesion, etc. In seeing, we have the highest
form of sense-perception as the perception of things in their external
independence--not as being destroyed chemically, like the objects of
taste and smell; not as being attacked and resisting, like the objects
which are known through the ear; not as mere limits to our organism, as
in the sense of touch.
Sense-perception, as the developed realization of the activity of
feeling, belongs to the animal creation, including man as an animal.
We have not yet, therefore, answered the question of capacity for
education, so far as it concerns a discrimination between man and
the brute. We have only arrived at the conclusion that the vegetable
world does not possess the capacity for education, because its
individual specimens are no complete individuals, but only transitory
phases manifesting the species by continual reproduction of
new individuals which are as incomplete as the old ones. Plant life
does not possess that self-activity which returns into itself in the
same individual--if we may so express it; it goes out of one individual
into another perpetually. Its identity is that of the _species_,
but not of the _individual_.
How is it with the animal--with the being which possesses sensibility,
or feeling? This question recurs. In feeling there is a reaction,
just as in the plant. This reaction is, however, in an ideal
form--the reproduction of the external without assimilation of it--and
especially is this the case in the sense of _sight_, though it is true
of all forms of sensation to a less degree.
But all forms of sensibility are limited and special; they refer only
to the _present_, in its forms of _here_ and _now_. The animal cannot feel
what is not here and now. Even seeing is limited to what is present
before it. When we reflect upon the significance of this limitation
of sense-perception, we shall find that we need some higher form of
self-activity still before we can realize the species in the individual,
_i.e._, before we can obtain the true individual--the permanent
individuality.
The defect in plant life was, that there was neither identity of
individuality in space nor identify in time. The growth of the
plant destroyed the individuality of the seed with which we began,
so that it was evanescent in time; it served only as the starting-point
for new individualities, which likewise, in turn, served again the same
purpose; and so its growth in space was a departure from itself as
individual.
The animal is a preservation of individuality as regards space. He
returns into himself in the form of _feeling_ or _sensibility_; but as
regards time, it is not so--feeling being limited to the present.
Without a higher activity than feeling, there is no continuity of
individuality in the animal any more than in the plant. Each new moment
is a new beginning to a being that has feeling, but not memory.
Thus the individuality of mere feeling, although a far more perfect
realization of individuality than that found in plant life, is yet,
after all, not a continuous individuality for itself, but only for the
species.
In spite of the ideal self-activity which appertains to feeling, even
in sense-perception, only the species lives in the animal and the
individual dies, unless there be higher forms of activity.