Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 1 - Institutes of Metaphysic (1875 ed.).djvu/257

RhPROP. VIII.———— two may be offered both on the materialistic and the spiritualistic conception of mind.

5. Both parties are in error at the outset. They undertake to declare what the mind is, before they have determined what it is known as. The early physiologists gave out that the mind was some kind of aura or finer breath, some highly attenuated species of matter; but they certainly never succeeded in showing that it was known as this. That very important point was prejudged. Their hypothesis was founded upon analogy. Matter was patent to universal observation. All things were seen to be material. Man's organism was material,—why should not his mind, his most intimate self, follow the same analogy, and be material too? Hence its materiality was assumed. The word, indeed, by which the thinking principle is designated in all languages bears evidence to the inveteracy of the superstition that the conception of mind might be formed by conceiving a material substance of extreme fineness and tenuity. Many circumstances have conspired to keep this fanaticism in life. The supposed visibility of ghosts helps it on considerably; and it is still further reinforced by some of the fashionable deliraments of the day, such as clairvoyance and (even A.D. 1854, credite posteri!) spirit-rapping. These, however, are not to be set down—at least so it is to be hoped—among the normal and catholic