Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 3 "Philosophical Remains" (1883 ed.).djvu/135

Rh blends with this feeling, it from that moment becomes weaker and less perfect. It is no longer pure and unalloyed, and consequently its integrity is violated, and its strength in some degree impaired; yet, according to our ordinary psychologists, the same object, namely, the rose, which induces the strength of the sensation, also brings along with it that suspension or weakening of the sensation which consciousness is. We are called upon to believe that the same cause at the same moment both produces and destroys a particular effect, a creed too contradictory and unintelligible to be easily embraced when thus plainly exposed. If a particular object induce a particular sensation, surely the suspension of that sensation, or, in other words, the consciousness which impairs it, and prevents it from being all-absorbing, cannot be induced by the same cause. And, besides, if our consciousness depended on our sensations, passions, or any other of our "states of mind," would not its light kindle, and its energy wax in proportion as these were brightened and increased? We have seen, however, that the reverse of this is the case, and that consciousness never burns more faintly than during man's most vivid paroxysms of sensation and of passion.

This argument, which is, however, rather a fact presented to us by experience than an inference, entirely disproves the dependency of man's consciousness upon the external objects which give birth to his sensations. It thus radically uproots that false