Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 3 "Philosophical Remains" (1883 ed.).djvu/21

Rh and maintained the first and third to be facts immediately given. So that between the two philosophers the whole three were at once admitted as facts, and rejected as hypotheses. Which is right and which is wrong cannot be decided here. Probably Hume is not so much in the wrong, nor Reid so much in the right, as they are generally imagined to be; for it is certain that common sense repudiates the conclusion of the latter, just as much as it does that of the former. The subject and object, mind and matter, supposing them to exist, are certainly given in one indivisible simultaneous fact constituting immediate perception. This is what the natural understanding maintains. This is the fact of representation, the second in our series: a synthesis perhaps of the other two facts; but nevertheless, according to the testimony of common sense, a distinct and undeniable fact, just as much as they are distinct and undeniable facts. This is the fact which Hume admits, and which Reid, however, rejects — his rejection of it being indeed the very lever by which he imagines himself at once to have replaced the other two facts in their original position, and to have displaced the conclusions by means of which Hume was supposed to have dislodged them. Common sense, therefore, is not more enlisted on the side of Reid, than on the side of Hume; and the truth is, the question remains as much open to question as ever. But the issue to which these philosophers have brought it, proves that there must have been some flaw in the original