Julien BENDA (1867-1956). Autograph manuscript, De la sensation pure...; 9 pages fol. Interesting philosophical study in 11 paragraphs, followed by 7 notes. The manuscript, carefully prepared for printing with a few erasures and corrections, is in the form of fragments cut out and pasted onto large pages; each paragraph is numbered, and its title underlined in red ink. The text was addressed to Daniel Halévy, as evidenced by an enclosed envelope from the "Pages Libres" bookshop, annotated by the latter. Benda analyzes the notions of "pure sensation", "felt object", "quality" and "substance", and speaks of the unreality of these dimensions. We quote from the first paragraph, De la sensation pure: "Let us consider a certain sensation, for example a sensation of green, & let us eliminate, in our consideration, the manner of being or quality of this sensation, which is from here to be 'of green'. I call pure sensation the sensation as it appears after this operation, i.e. considered only as a sensation, independently of "which" sensation it is. We can also say that pure sensation is the thing which, through several sensations of various qualities (e.g. green, musk, & E-flat), remains identical to itself"...