Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 1 - Institutes of Metaphysic (1875 ed.).djvu/180

152PROP. V.———— on precisely the same footing with the secondary; if we know nothing about either class as they are in themselves; and if the attempt to reduce our whole knowledge of the material world to a mere series of sensations be successful, these sensations may possibly be excited by other causes, and accounted for on other pounds than the postulation of an independent universe; and therefore the existence of the latter becomes, at any rate, problematical. With the annihilation of the sentient subject, the material universe would disappear—would be reduced to a nonentity, because it consists of a mere series of sensations.

Such is the psychological conception of idealism. This system is supposed to aim at the extinction of material things, and to withdraw them from our cognition, by confounding or repudiating the distinction between the primary and secondary qualities. The psychologist conceives that idealism is founded on a false generalisation to this effect:—some of the qualities of matter, such as heat, sound, and colour, turn out, on examination, to be mere sensations in us, therefore the whole of the material qualities are susceptible of this resolution.

9. Having thus detected what he conceives to be the fallacy involved in the idealist's argument—namely, the false generalisation on which it proceeds, in other words, the shuffling together of the