Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 1 - Institutes of Metaphysic (1875 ed.).djvu/258

230PROP. VIII.———— incident to humanity. They are much worse than the worst form of the doctrine of materiality. These aberrations betoken a perverse and prurient play of the abnormal fancy—groping for the very holy of holies in kennels running with the most senseless and god-abandoned abominations. Our natural superstitions are bad enough; but thus to make a systematic business of fatuity, imposture, and profanity, and to imagine, all the while, that we are touching on the precincts of God's spiritual kingdom, is unspeakably shocking. The horror and disgrace of such proceedings were never even approached in the darkest days of heathendom and idolatry. Ye who make shattered nerves and depraved sensations the interpreters of truth, the keys which shall unlock the gates of heaven, and open the secrets of futurity—ye who inaugurate disease as the prophet of all wisdom, thus making sin, death, and the devil, the lords paramount of creation—have ye bethought yourselves of the backward and downward course which ye are running into the pit of the bestial and the abhorred? Oh, ye miserable mystics! when will ye know that all God's truths and all man's blessings lie in the broad health, in the trodden ways, and in the laughing sunshine of the universe, and that all intellect, all genius, is merely the power of seeing wonders in common things!

6. The materialistic conception of mind, or the