Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 1 - Institutes of Metaphysic (1875 ed.).djvu/593

Rh more than it is any other man's conclusion. It follows just as inevitably from putting the premises together (and the premises are obtained in the same inevitable way), as a neutral salt follows when an acid and an alkali are brought into combination. The conclusions of a demonstrated philosophy are no more the peculiar opinions of an individual thinker, than the muscles of the human body are the peculiar muscles of an individual anatomist.

My philosophy denies the separate existence of mind only in this sense, that it holds the word mind to be an expression of nonsense, when this mind is represented as existing in no state at all, or with no thoughts or things of any kind present to it. It does not, however, hold the mind thus circumstanced, or rather non-circumstanced, to be a nonentity, but only a nonsensical, an absolutely inconceivable. According to my system, a truly existing mind is a mind with some environment of states, some accompaniment either of thoughts or of things. I do not subvert the substantiality of the mind. On the contrary, I confirm it, by making the substantiality of the mind to consist in its being the One great Permanent and Immutable Constituent, amid all the fluctuating states by which it may be visited, or the transitory things among which it may be placed. My system not only does not render all consistent belief in personal identity "impossible;" it is the only system in the world of which that belief is