Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 1 - Institutes of Metaphysic (1875 ed.).djvu/261

RhPROP. VIII.———— either because the supposition contradicts reason, or because it contradicts experience. If it contradicts reason, let him point out the contradiction: if it contradicts experience, let him show that it does so. He can do neither; he never attempts to do either; and therefore he does not prove, he merely asserts. But the materialist also asserts, and with better reason, in so far as probabilities and plausibilities are concerned. Matter is already in the field as an acknowledged entity—this both parties admit. Mind, considered as an independent entity, is not so clearly and unmistakably in the field. Therefore, on the principle that entities are not to be multiplied without necessity, the defender of immaterialism is not entitled to postulate an unknown basis for the intellectual phenomena, and an unknown cause for the intellectual effects, so long as it is possible to refer them to the known basis, or to account for them by the known cause, already in existence. Now this possibility has never been disproved on necessary grounds of reason.

9. The fundamental disturbance which oversets the schemes, both of the materialist and of the spiritualist, and prevents either of them from attaining to any distinct conception of the mind, is to be found, as has been said, in the circumstance that they attempted to declare what it was, before they had ascertained what it was known as. They