Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 3 "Philosophical Remains" (1883 ed.).djvu/20

10 his philosophy — the object of which was to expose, in all its magnitude, the vice of the prevailing doctrines of his times. Is this, says he, your boasted philosophy? Behold, then, what its consequences amount to! And his reductio, designed, as it was, to act back upon this philosophy, and to confound it, was certainly most triumphant. If Hume did not rectify the errors of his predecessors, he at any rate brought them clearly to light; and these errors consisted in the omission of certain phenomena, by which man was curtailed of his real proportions, and emptied of his true self. Take another instance. What has involved the doctrine of perception in so much perplexity, except the uncertainty and fluctuation which prevail respecting its facts? Without speculating one word on the subject, let us look for a moment to the facts of the question, let us see in what a state they stand, and how they have been dealt with by two of our most illustrious philosophers. At the time of Hume three facts were admitted in the prevailing doctrine of perception, and understood to stand exactly upon the same level with regard to their certainty. First, the object (i.e., the external world perceived). Second, the image, impression, representation, or whatever else it may be called, of this. Third, the subject (i.e., the mind of man perceiving). Hume embraced the second of these as a fact immediately given; but displaced the other two as mediate and hypothetical. Reid, on the other hand, rejected the second as mediate and hypothetical,