| First, It is directly contrary to experience, and our immediate consciousness. |
| All men have ever allowed reasoning to be merely an operation of our thoughts or ideas; and however those ideas may be varied to the feeling, there is nothing ever enters into our conclusions but ideas, or our fainter conceptions. |
| For instance; I hear at present a person's voice, whom I am acquainted with; and this sound comes from the next room. |
| This impression of my senses immediately conveys my thoughts to the person, along with all the surrounding objects. |
| I paint them out to myself as existent at present, with the same qualities and relations, that I formerly knew them possessed of. |
| These ideas take faster hold of my mind, than the ideas of an inchanted castle. |
| They are different to the feeling; but there is no distinct or separate impression attending them. |
| It is the same case when I recollect the several incidents of a journey, or the events of any history. |
| Every particular fact is there the object of belief. |
| Its idea is modified differently from the loose reveries of a castle-builder: But no distinct impression attends every distinct idea, or conception of matter of fact. |
| This is the subject of plain experience. |
| If ever this experience can be disputed on any occasion, it is when the mind has been agitated with doubts and difficulties; and afterwards, upon taking the object in a new point of view, or being presented with a new argument, fixes and reposes itself in one settled conclusion and belief. |
| In this case there is a feeling distinct and separate from the conception. |
| The passage from doubt and agitation to tranquility and repose, conveys a satisfaction and pleasure to the mind. |
| But take any other case. |
| Suppose I see the legs and thighs of a person in motion, while some interposed object conceals the rest of his body. |
| Here it is certain, the imagination spreads out the whole figure. |
| I give him a head and shoulders, and breast and neck. |
| These members I conceive and believe him to be possessed of. |
| Nothing can be more evident, than that this whole operation is performed by the thought or imagination alone. |
| The transition is immediate. |