Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 3 "Philosophical Remains" (1883 ed.).djvu/144

134 word only, but also in vital deed; that your refusal to be acted upon by them constitutes your very personality and your very perception of them; that this perception arises not in consequence of the union, but in consequence of the disunion between yourselves and matter; and, in fine, that your consciousness, even in its simplest acts, so far from being in harmony and keeping with the constitution of nature, is the commencement of that grand disruption between yourselves and the world, which perhaps ye will know more about before ye die?

Of all difficult entails to be broken through, the most difficult is the entail of false facts and erroneous opinions. If, however, the foregoing observations be attended to, we trust we have done something to cut off speculators yet unborn from their inheritances of error. Of all the false facts involved in the "science of the human mind," the greatest is this, that, starting from the assumption of "mind" as a given substance, we are thereby led to believe that the ego or central and peculiar point of humanity comes into the world ready-made. In opposition to this belief, the true fact is that the ego does not thus come into the world, but that the being which is now "I" was not "I" at first, but became "I" after a time and after a process, which it is the business of the philosopher to explain. Various other fictitious facts spring out of this tap-root of error. Thus, if we start from mind as a given substance, we, of course, are compelled to make this, in the first