Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 3 "Philosophical Remains" (1883 ed.).djvu/210

200 nexus, the moment we are born. By imposing their agency upon us, they prevent us from exercising our own. By filling us with them, they prevent us from becoming ourselves. They do all they can to withhold each of us from becoming "I." They throw every obstacle they can in the way of our becoming conscious beings; they strive, by every possible contrivance, to keep down our personality. They would fain have each of us to take all our activity from them, instead of becoming, each man for himself, a new centre of free and independent action.

But, strong as these powers are, and actively as they exert themselves to fulfil their tendencies with respect to man, they do not succeed for ever in rendering human personality a non-existent thing. After a time man proves too strong for them; he rises up against them, and shakes their shackles from his hands and feet. He puts forth (obscurely and unsystematically, no doubt), but still he puts forth a particular kind of act, which thwarts and sets at nought the whole causal domination of nature. Out of the working of this act is evolved man in his character of a free, personal, and moral being. This act is itself man; it is man acting, and man in act precedes, as we have seen, man in being, that is, in true and proper being. Nature and her powers have now no constraining hold over him; he stands out of her jurisdiction. In this act he has taken himself out of her hands into his own; he has made himself his own master. In this act he has displaced his sensations,