Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 1 - Institutes of Metaphysic (1875 ed.).djvu/256

228PROP. VIII.———— this—Eighth counter-proposition: "The ego might possibly be known to be material. There is no necessary law of reason which prevents it from being apprehended by the senses."

4. This counter-proposition is the common property both of the materialistic and of the spiritual psychologists. The materialist holds that nothing except matter is known: hence he holds that, if the ego or mind is known at all, it is known as material. The only distinction which he acknowledges between mind and matter is, that the one is matter knowing, and the other matter known. Mind is supposed to be either itself a highly-refined species of matter, or else a property of certain kinds or combinations of matter—a mere result of physical organisation. The brain produces intelligence, just as the stomach, or rather some part of the nervous apparatus, produces hunger. At any rate, according to the materialist, there is no necessary law of reason which prevents the mind from being known as matter, or as some sort of dependency on matter. The spiritualist, again, though he denies, as a question of fact, that the mind is known to be material, does not deny this as a question of possibility. His denial does not amount to the assertion, much less to the proof, of Proposition VIII. It is merely a dissuasive, intimating that it is better, on the whole, to suppose that the mind is not material. A critical remark or