ABSTRACT
Knowing, striving and feeling, these seem to be three distinguishable but inseparable aspects of all mental activity. Can we be mentally alive and yet wholly inactive, merely receiving impressions or passively experiencing? Sometimes we do seem to come near to such passive experience. One lies inert, almost asleep, not clearly aware of oneself or one’s surroundings; perhaps with what we call a vague sense of well-being or comfort, or of discomfort. Perhaps there are sounds about us; certainly there are pressures on the skin that change from moment to moment, and various processes going on in our bodies, breathing and beating of the heart, the flow of the blood through all our organs. All such physical changes can and do affect our sense-organs in some degree, however slight, both those of the surface and those of the interior of the body (the latter impressions are commonly classed together under the comprehensive term, coenaesthesis). And, if we direct attention to any part of the body, we readily discover ‘sensations’, if only a buzzing in the ears, a vague field of light, a sense of pressure or tension, a tickling or a slight pain, the respiratory movements of the chest and abdomen.
