Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 1 - Institutes of Metaphysic (1875 ed.).djvu/84

56 of their own vulgar opinions, that it is at all affected by the cavils of their own ordinary judgment, or that it can be turned out of its inflexible orbit by any collision with those earth-born and evanescent meteors of their own customary thinking, which are perpetually crossing and obscuring, but certainly never deflecting, its colossal transit through the skies.

§ 65. The following is a case in point. The earth and "all that it inherit" are whirling through space with a velocity which it requires rather large numbers to compute. We know that to be a fact; but we cannot feel it;—indeed, we feel the very contrary. In spite of science, we believe ourselves, at least when we are lying still, to be imperturbably at rest; and this conviction is equally shared in by the profoundest astronomer reclining on his couch of down, and by the most unscientific peasant stretched upon his pallet of straw. An astronomer is not always an astronomer. When he comes down from his observatory, he leaves his computations and his demonstrations behind him. He has done with them for, at least, a while. He thinks, and feels, and speaks just like other people; he takes the same view of the heavens and the earth that ordinary mortals do. His hat is bigger than the sun. So of the metaphysician. He is not always a metaphysician. In common life, he can