Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 3 "Philosophical Remains" (1883 ed.).djvu/192

182 monopolised by the passive state into which he had been cast. The whole of his being would be usurped by the passive modification into which circumstances had moulded it. But the act of negation or consciousness puts an end to this monopoly. Its presence displaces the sensation to a certain extent, however small that extent may be. An antagonism is now commenced against passion (for all sensation is passion), and who can say where this antagonism is to stop? (We shall show, in its proper place, that all morality centres in this antagonism.) The great unity of sensation, that is, the state which prevailed anterior to the dualisation of subject and object, is broken up, and man's sensations and other passive states of existence never again possess the entireness of their first unalloyed condition, that entireness which they possessed in his infantine years, that wholeness and singleness which was theirs before the act of negation broke the universe asunder into the world of man and the world of nature.

This, then, proves that consciousness, or the act of negation, is not the harmonious accompaniment and dependent, but is the antagonist and the violator of sensation. Let us endeavour once more to show that this act, from its very character, must be underived and free. The proof is as follows. Sensation is a given or derivative state. It has, therefore, from the first a particular positive character. But this act is nothing in itself; it has no positive character; it is merely the opposite, the entire opposite of sensation.