Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 3 "Philosophical Remains" (1883 ed.).djvu/128

118 they no doubt hit the true facts and their true explanation, but then they entirely miss, as we shall see, the question properly at issue, and, instead of grappling with it, they explain to us that which stands in need of no explanation.

But by "perception" Dr Brown and other philosophers probably understand something more than "sensation." If so, what is the additional fact they understand by it? When we have found it, we will then fix for them the other horn of our dilemma.

When animals and young children are sentient, there is in them, as we have all along seen, nothing more than sensation. The state of being into which they are cast is simple and single. It is merely a certain effect following a certain cause. There is in it nothing whatsoever of a reflex character. A particular sensation is, in their case, given or induced by its particular external cause, and nothing more is given. Indeed, what more could we rationally expect the fragrant particles of a rose to give than the sensation of the smell of a rose? Here, then, the state into which the sentient creature is thrown begins, continues, and ends, in simple and mixed sensation, and that is all that can be said about it.

But when we ourselves are sentient, we find the state of the fact to be widely different from this. We find that our sentient condition is not, as is the case in children and animals, a monopoly of sensation, but that here a new fact is evolved, over and above the sensation, which makes the phenomenon