Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 3 "Philosophical Remains" (1883 ed.).djvu/163

Rh is obviously nothing. The divorce, then, between consciousness, and all these powers and operations, may be conceived as perfectly complete; and this conception is all that is here necessary for the purposes of our coming argument.

Existence, then, together with all the powers and operations just indicated, might be truly predicated of man, even in his unconscious state. And even more than this might be affirmed of him. We could not, indeed, with propriety, say (the reason of which will appear by-and-by) that man, without consciousness, would be invested in any degree with a moral character. Yet even here, according to the moral philosophy of Paley and his school, in which morality is expounded as the mere adaptation of means to ends in the production of the social welfare, which adaptation might be perfectly well effected without any consciousness on the part of man, just as bees and other animals adapt means to ends without being aware of what they are about; according to this view, man, although unconscious, would still be a moral creature. Neither, without consciousness, would man possess laws in the proper sense of the word; but here, too, according to the Hobbesian doctrines which make law to consist in the domination or supremacy of force, and the power of a supreme magistrate all that is necessary to constitute it, man might, in every respect, be considered a finished legislator, and a creature living under laws.

But it is time to turn these preliminary