rily shown that the notion of an
extended resisting body, supposed by many to be resolved into the
sensations of touch, cannot be derived from this source alone, but must
have some other origin than the pure sensation, which is a mere mental
phenomenon or state of the consciousness. But he imagined he had
overcome the difficulty by introducing to us a new sensation, the
_muscular_, that which we experience when we move our limbs. What he
could not derive from the old sense of touch, he thought himself able to
deduce from the reasonings of the mind on this muscular sensation; but
the same difficulties which he himself so lucidly set forth when
treating upon touch, will be found to pursue him here also. This
muscular sensation, like every other, is in itself a mere state of the
consciousness, begins and ends in a mere pleasure or pain. That it
terminates abruptly, and contrary to our volition, in a feeling of
resistance, (as when our arm is arrested in its motion,) is saying
nothing more than that one sensation gives place to another without our
willing it; a statement which might be made in a thousand other cases of
sensation with equal propriety. But the author shall explain his own
theory.

"The infant stretches his arm for the first time, by that volition
without a known object, which is either a mere instinct or very near
akin to one; this motion is accompanied with a certain feeling; he
repeats the volition, which moves his arm, fifty or one thousand times,
and the same progress of feeling takes place during the muscular action.
In this repeated progress he feels the truth of that intuitive
proposition, which in the whole course of the life that awaits him is to
be the source of all his expectations, and the guide of all his
actions--the simple proposition that _what has been_ as an antecedent,
will be followed by _what has been_ as a consequent. At length he
stretches out his arm _again_, and instead of the accustomed
progression, there arises, in the resistance of some object opposed to
him, a feeling of a very different kind, which, if he persevere in his
voluntary effort, increases gradually to severe pain, before he has half
completed the usual progress. There is a difference, therefore, which
we may without any absurdity suppose to astonish the little reasoner;
for the expectation of similar consequents from similar antecedents, is
observable even in his earliest actions, and is probably the result of
an orig