Sentient being

“ For on this account, perhaps, -- nay, not perhaps, but certainly, -- does every mind judge natures in any way alive to excel those that are not alive, the sentient to excel the non-sentient, the rational the irrational. ”

“ How can that which is a purely subjective affection—in other words, which is dependent upon us as a mere modification of our sentient nature—acquire, nevertheless, such a distinct objective reality, as shall compel us to acknowledge it as an independent creation, the permanent existence of which, is beyond the control of all that we can either do or think? ”

“ And, among things that have life, the sentient are higher than those which have no sensation, as animals are ranked above trees. And, among the sentient, the intelligent are above those that have not intelligence,—men, e.g., above cattle. And, among the intelligent, the immortal, such as the angels, above the mortal, such as men. These are the gradations according to the order of nature; but according to the utility each man finds in a thing, there are various standards of value, so that it comes to pass that we prefer some things that have no sensation to some sentient beings. ”

“ But though the sensations cease, the possibilities remain in existence; they are independent of our will, our presence, and everything which belongs to us. We find, too, that they belong as much to other human or sentient beings as to ourselves. We find other people grounding their expectations and conduct upon the same permanent possibilities on which we ground ours. ”

“ Our faculty, such as it is, is rather instinctive than reasoning; rather physical than metaphysical; rather sentient because it loves much, than because it knows much; rather calculated by a certain retention of boyhood, and by its wanderings in the green places of thought, to light upon a piece of the old golden world, than to tire ourselves, and conclude it unattainable, by too wide and scientific a search. We pretend to see farther than none but the worldly and the malignant. ”

“ If for a moment I take the whole earth together and regard it as a sentient being, I find that the problem of its apprehension is a very complex one, and involves a long series of personal and physical events. ”

“ The feeling or sentient individual is the simple “ideality” or subjective side of sensation. What it has to do, therefore, is to raise its substantiality, its merely virtual filling-up, to the character of subjectivity, to take possession of it, to realise its mastery over its own. As sentient, the soul is no longer a mere natural, but an inward, individuality: the individuality which in the merely substantial totality was only formal to it has to be liberated and made independent. ”

“ The pleasure of Tender feeling must therefore be pronounced to have an independent standing in the sentient framework, although susceptible of being analysed into the primary pleasures of the senses, together with the influence of association. All the affections derive the chief part of their strength from this complex source. ”

“ But when we ourselves are sentient, we find the state of the fact to be widely different from this. We find that our sentient condition is not, as is the case in children and animals, a monopoly of sensation, but that here a new fact is evolved, over and above the sensation, which makes the phenomenon a much more complicated and extraordinary one. ”

“ If we turn to the moral world, where, strange as it seems, we meet with less clearness and grandeur, yet there our deep interest in its truths supplies a different, perhaps a more powerful attraction. While we wonder and hope, the general laws of sentient existence give us glimpses of their harmony with those of inanimate nature. ”

“ Not the whole subject—the fact that as things are designed in this world of sentient life there can be no good, no sweetness or pleasure in life, nor peace and contentment and safety, nor happiness and joy, nor any beauty or strength or lustre, nor any bright and shining quality of body or mind, without pain, which is not an accident nor an incident, nor something ancillary to life, but is involved in and a part of life, of its very colour and texture. ”

“ For I wish to make it quite plain that the psychical fact from which I propose to start, is on what I may perhaps best call the sentient level of consciousness, i.e. involves only a consciousness which feels pleasure and pain, which strives and desires without as yet clear self-consciousness or conception of objects. ”

“ The total sensitivity has its self here in a separate subjectivity, which, in the case cited of this sentient life in the ordinary course of nature, is visibly present as another and a different individual. But this sensitive totality is meant to elevate its self-hood out of itself to subjectivity in one and the same individual: which is then its indwelling consciousness, self-possessed, intelligent, and reasonable. For such a consciousness the merely sentient life serves as an underlying and only implicitly existent material ”

“ The sentient soul communes with particulars; the noëtic soul with 464universals. The sentient soul derives its stimulus from without, and from some of the individual objects, tangible, visible, or audible; but the noëtic soul is put into action by the abstract and universal, which is in a certain sense within the soul itself; so that a man can at any time meditate on what he pleases, but he cannot see or hear what he pleases, or anything except such visible or audible objects as are at hand.67 ”

“ But even the modified optimism of the time-honoured thesis of physico-theology, that the sentient world is, on the whole, regulated by principles of benevolence, does but ill stand the test of impartial confrontation with the facts of the case. No doubt it is quite true that sentient nature affords hosts of examples of subtle contrivances directed towards the production of pleasure or the avoidance of pain ”

“ But even this minimum of sense — though small, if compared with the variety of senses in man — is a prodigious step in advance of plants; it comprises a certain cognition, and within its own sphere it is always critical, comparing, discriminative.69 The sentient soul possesses this discriminative faculty in common with the noëtic soul or Intelligence, though applied to different objects and purposes ”

“ From this conclusion to the one that the sentient beings that doubtless dwell upon these planets are far in advance of the inhabitants of our earth, intellectually, morally, spiritually and in everything that makes for higher development, and more perfect civilization, is but a little step, and rests on strong probability. ”

“ The discoveries made with the telescope produced, as time went on, a great alteration in the notions of men with regard to the universe at large. It must have been, indeed, a revelation to find that those points of light which they called the planets, were, after all, globes of a size comparable with the earth, and peopled perchance with sentient beings. Even to us, who have been accustomed since our early youth to such an idea, it still requires a certain stretch of imagination to enlarge, say, the Bright Star of Eve, into a body similar in size to our earth. ”

“ Only where there is sentient life can there be feelings of pleasure and pain, sorrow or joy. ”

“ Again, a material object has an interest only so far as it is a condition of some kind of feeling, and, when the sympathies are not concerned, of some feeling of my own, whether implying or not implying any foretaste of the future. To take any interest in any material object, except in this relation, is unreasonable, as it is unreasonable to desire food which cannot nourish or fire which cannot warm. I want something which has by hypothesis no relation to my wants. The same is true of the sentient object so long, and only so long, as I do not take its sentience into account. ”

“ To take sentience into account is to sympathize, to feel with. The only condition necessary for the sympathy to exist, and to be capable, therefore, of becoming a motive, is that I should really believe in the object, and hence have representative feelings. Systematically to ignore these relations is to act as I should act if I were an egoist in the extremest sense and held that there were no consciousness in the world except my own. ”

“ What is the ultimate aim of all this process of evolution? What is the Divine ideal towards which all creation presses, consciously or unconsciously? To find out the ultimate destination of sentient creatures may be difficult or even impossible ”

“ As he stands related to brute creatures, however, one new factor is introduced, which is that of sentiency, on the opposite side of the relationship, as well as on the side of the human actor, and we find in the conduct incident to this a single quality which we recognize as of absolute existence—inhering in the very nature of the act to which it pertains. ”

“ It is as difficult philosophically to conceive that they can as it is practically to conceive that they do not. And since, whether they do or do not, the world we live in is phenomenal; since it is to phenomena that we have to adapt our conduct; since it is with phenomena that all our thoughts and emotions have reference; since the world we construct in mental symbolism is the world in which we live and move and have our being; it is not only convenient, but logically justifiable, to call this world of phenomena the really existing world for us human-folk and other sentient organisms. ”

“ Our main wants—for truth and life, and for beauty and goodness—must all find satisfaction. And we have seen that this consummation must somehow be experience, and be individual. Every element of the universe, sensation, feeling, thought and will, must be included within one comprehensive sentience. And the question which now occurs is whether really we have a positive idea of such sentience. Do we at all know what we mean when we say that it is actual?
Fully to realize the existence of the Absolute is for finite beings impossible. ”

“ We know, they say, that the world is real; but how should we know that its inner Being, so foreign to ours, resembles our own will? But our own Fourth Conception of Being is not in the older sense animistic. ”

“ When we speak of the ego, do we mean the self of to-day, or of yesterday, or of some years back—or possibly some years in the future when we shall have found the expression now unhappily denied us? Do we mean the self of boyhood, or even of babyhood? or do we mean that of maturity, or of old age? Do we mean the self indicated by the mind alone, or by the spirit, apart from the body? ”

“ I mean that to be real is to be indissolubly one thing with sentience. It is to be something which comes as a feature and aspect within one whole of feeling, something which, except as an integral element of such sentience, has no meaning at all. ”

“ When we look closely and deeply at the world about us,—whether at this ordered world of nature, moving steadily in its unbroken and majestic course, or at the external aspect of grandeur and loveliness, or at the drama in which all men are actors, as it is disclosed to insight and sympathy, or at the inner world of each one's personal experience,—do we not find ourselves in the perpetual presence of Goodness, Order, Beauty, Love? ”

“ All literature has overdone the dog-like fidelity of simple minds. The essence of loyalty of man to man is made of love-capacity and understanding—and these are qualities that come from evolution of the soul just as every other fine thing comes.
We perceive the old farmer on his door-step in the evening—love and life-lines of labour upon him; we enjoy his haleness and laughter.... But that is the mask. His mind and its every attribute of consciousness is designed to smother an awakened soul. ”

“ Let us first try to understand what we know concerning ourselves. The longer one lives and the more one studies the mystery of "Being," the more one is forced to the conclusion that in every Human Being there are two Personalities, call them what you like—"the Real and its Image," "the Spiritual and its Material Shadow," or "the Transcendental and its Physical Ego." ”

“ I am formed, if for anything not in common with the herd of mankind, to apprehend minute and remote distinctions of feeling, whether relative to external nature or the living beings which surround us, and to communicate the conceptions which result from considering either the moral or the material universe as a whole. Of course, I believe these faculties, which perhaps comprehend all that is sublime in man, to exist very imperfectly in my own mind. ”

“ Say what you like, to get its joy, to breathe its peace, to face its truth, one must return with a clear conscience. All this may seem to you sheer sentimentalism; and indeed very few of us have the will or the capacity to look consciously under the surface of familiar emotions. ”

“ When our characters take form in external Life, Thought must give us discrimination, Imagination must give us courage, and Affection must give us earnestness; then our external nature will be the transparent medium through which the internal nature will shine, with a lustre undiminished by the opacity which is sure to dim its radiance when dulness, fearfulness, or indolence inheres with the external nature; for then it forms a husk to hide, instead of a medium to display, the workings of the inner being. ”

“ It is through these feelings that the conscience becomes a motive power for moral life. The perception of duty alone, as purely intellectual, would be, as said, "like a mirror accurately reflecting the ethical reality passing before it, but as indifferent as the mirror." But upon the perception the emotional nature springs into action. Knowledge, if at all, always goes into effect mediately through the sensibilities in which the soul is stirred by affections and desires. ”

“ As life has advanced, the accompanying sentiency has become increasingly ideal; and, among feelings produced by the compounding of ideas, the highest, and those which have evolved latest, are the re-compounded or doubly ideal. Hence it follows that as guides the feelings have authorities proportionate to the degrees in which they are removed by their complexity and ideality from simple sensations and appetites. ”