Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 3 "Philosophical Remains" (1883 ed.).djvu/202

192 and by which, from being a dead system of theory, she may be renovated into a living discipline of practice? There is, if we will but reflect and understand that the course of procedure proper to the physical sciences—namely, the assumption that their, objects and the facts appertaining to these objects lie before them ready-made—is utterly inadmissible in true philosophy, is totally at variance with the scope and spirit of a science which professes to deal fairly with the phenomena of Man. Let us endeavour to point out and illustrate the deep-seated contradistinction between philosophical and physical science, for the purpose, more particularly, of getting light thrown upon the moral character of our species.

When an inquirer is engaged in the scientific study of any natural object, let us say, for instance, of water and its phenomena, his contemplation of this object does not add any new phenomenon to the facts and qualities already belonging to it. These phenomena remain the same, without addition or diminution, whether he studies them or not. Water flows downwards, rushes into a vacuum under the atmospheric pressure, and evolves all its other phenomena, whether man be attending to them or not. His looking on makes no difference as far as the nature of the water is concerned. In short, the number and character of its facts continue altogether uninfluenced by his study of them. His science merely enables him to classify them, and to bring them more clearly and steadily before him.