Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 3 "Philosophical Remains" (1883 ed.).djvu/191

Rh very condition or constituent ground upon which it rests, and therefore the being "I" cannot possibly precede or be given anterior to this act of negation. We may say, if we please, that this act of negation is the act "I," but not that it arises out of the being "I," because the whole testimony of facts discountenances such a conclusion, and goes to establish the very reverse. The perfect truth is, that man acts I before he is I, that is to say, he acts before he truly is; his act precedes and realises his being—a direct reversal of the ordinary doctrine, but a most important one, as far as the establishment of human liberty is concerned; because, in making man's existence to depend upon his act, and in showing his act to be absolutely original and underived, an act of antagonism against the derivative modifications of his given nature, we encircle him with an atmosphere of liberty, and invest him with a moral character and the dread attribute of responsibility, which of course would disappear if man, at every step, moved in the preordained footprints of fate, and were not, in some respect or other, unconditionally free. And move in these footprints he must, the bondsman of necessity in all things, if it be true that his real and proper substantive existence precedes and gives rise to his acts.

If this act of negation never took place, the sphere of sensation would be enlarged. The sensation would reign absorbing, undisputed, and supreme; or, in other words, man would, in every case, be