Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 3 "Philosophical Remains" (1883 ed.).djvu/150

140 in a genesis which makes the one arise out of the other, and you have the famous fundamental position of the Cartesian philosophy, Cogito, ergo sum, a formula which is worthy of respect, for this reason, if for no other, that by it the attention of psychologists was first distinctly directed to the only known instance in which a notion and a reality are identical and coincident, in which a thought is the same as a thing.

But, by means of the dogma, Cogito, ergo sum, was it not the design of Descartes to prove his own existence? Take our word for it, no such miserable intention ever entered into his head. His great object, in the first place, was emphatically to signalise the very singular and altogether anomalous phenomenon we have spoken of, namely, the identity in man of thought and reality, and then to found upon this point as on a rock which no conceivable scepticism could shake; and, in the second place, he attempted to point out the genesis of the ego, in so far as it admitted of logical exposition. Cogito, ergo sum, I am conscious, therefore I am; that is, consciousness, or the notion of "I," takes place in a particular Being, and the reality of "I" is the immediate result. The ergo here does not denote a mere logical inference from the fact of consciousness, but it points to a genetic or creative power in that act.

"Consciousness created you, that is to say, you created yourself; did you?" we may here imagine an opponent of Descartes to interpose.