Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 3 "Philosophical Remains" (1883 ed.).djvu/205

Rh or else, breaking loose from that analogy, she may direct her attention to the novel and unparalleled phenomenon which she, of herself, has added to her object, and which we have already described. Of these two courses, philosophy has chosen to adopt the former—and what has been the result? Surely all the ready-made phenomena of man have been, by this time, sufficiently explored. Philosophers, undisturbed, have pondered over his passions; unmoved they have watched and weighed his emotions. His affections, his rational states, his sensations, and all the other ingredients and modifications of his natural framework have been rigidly scrutinised and classified by them; and, after all, what have they made of it? what sort of a picture have their researches presented to our observation? Not the picture of a man; but the representation of an automaton, that is what it cannot help being; a phantom dreaming what it cannot but dream; an engine performing what it must perform; an incarnate reverie; a weathercock shifting helplessly in the winds of sensibility; a wretched association machine, through which ideas pass linked together by laws over which the machine has no control; anything, in short, except that free and self-sustained centre of underived, and therefore responsible activity, which we call Man.

If such, therefore, be the false representation of man which philosophy invariably and inevitably pictures forth whenever she makes common cause with the natural sciences, we have plainly no other course