Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 1 - Institutes of Metaphysic (1875 ed.).djvu/264

236PROP. VIII.———— may convince any one that he can, and does, entertain the conception of himself only as that which is the universal and identical part of all his conceptions and cognition; and that he cannot form any idea of himself except as this.

12. The error of the spiritualist is of precisely the same character. He holds the ego, or mind, to be an immaterial substance. This also is wrong, as the immaterialist puts it; because he rests this statement on the assumption that the ego is a particular substance. At any rate, it is a mere expenditure of words to which no meaning can be attached. The spiritualist is a torment to mankind fully as much as the materialist, because, undertaking to teach us what the mind is, he leaves us totally in the dark as to what it is known as; and the consequence is, that he fails to teach us what it is, and merely palms off upon us certain crude fancies which enjoy the credit of being somewhat more reputable and orthodox than the tenets of his opponent. There can be no conception of the mind as a particular immaterial substance, any more than there can be a conception of it as a particular material substance; because, as has been shown, the only conception of it which is possible is the conception of it as the universal and unchangeable factor in all our cognitions,—whether these cognition contain, as their particular factor, phenomena which are material, or