Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 1 - Institutes of Metaphysic (1875 ed.).djvu/265

RhPROP. VIII.———— phenomena which are immaterial. If the word immaterial be used as a synonym for universal, it would be quite right to say that the ego was immaterial; but if it be used to designate anything particular, in that case the ego is certainly no more immaterial than it is material. But it is in the latter acceptation that the psychologist employs the term: and hence he is in error. I am not this table, or my own body, or any particular material thing that can be presented to me; but just as little am I any particular thought, or feeling, that may occur to me. When I think of the death of Julius Cæsar, I am not that immaterial thought. When I entertain the feeling of resentment, I am not the resentment which I entertain. I am not the anger or the pain which I experience, any more than I am the chair or the table which I perceive. Caliban, indeed, (in The Tempest), declares that he is "a cramp—an incarnate rheumatism; but this is a flight of speech—a hyperbole rather poetical than philosophical. Whether a particular material thing or a particular immaterial thought is before me, "I" am not the total cognition which I may be dealing with. I am simply known to myself as the universal part of that, and of all my other cognitions.

13. The error, then, of the materialist consists in the supposition that the mind or self is a particular