Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 1 - Institutes of Metaphysic (1875 ed.).djvu/594

566 a vital and essential part. Personal identity is accidental to all other philosophical schemes; to mine it is the very breath of life. Take from it this, and it dies. What is the assertion of personal identity, except the assertion that there can be no knowledge, no continued consciousness, without the presence, amid all the fluctuations of cognition, of that permanent and never-fluctuating constituent which we call "I"? And is not the pulsation of this latter truth felt and seen in every movement of my philosophical system?

I maintain that a contradiction is involved in our attempt to conceive the universe without any " me," or mind, in connection with it; but that no contradiction is involved in our thinking it in connection with a " me," or mind, other than our individual selves. According to my system, it is nonsense to affirm that things can exist without any mind; but it is not nonsense to affirm that they can exist in connection with some other mind than my individual self. An illustration will make this plain: Let us suppose the centre of a circle to be endowed with consciousness, and suppose we affirm that this centre can have no cognisance of the circumference, without being cognisant of itself (the centre) as well. What would follow? This would follow, that the centre could never think either of its own circumference without thinking of itself, or of any other