Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 1 - Institutes of Metaphysic (1875 ed.).djvu/171

RhPROP. IV.———— ? The materialist supposes that, according to idealism, when a loaf of bread ceases to be a phenomenon of consciousness, and is locked away in a dark closet, it must turn into nothing. He might as well fancy that, according to idealism, it must turn into cheese. Idealism does not hold that when a thing ceases altogether to be a phenomenon of consciousness, it becomes another phenomenon of consciousness, as this supposition would imply. No—in the absence of all consciousness, the loaf, or whatever it may be, lapses, not into nothing, but into the contradictory. It becomes the absolutely incogitable—a surd—from which condition it can be redeemed only when some consciousness of it is either known or conceived. But the question is,—Is our reason competent to conceive the abstraction of all consciousness from this, or from any other, object in the universe? This competency may very well be doubted: perhaps hereafter good grounds may appear for denying it.