Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 3 "Philosophical Remains" (1883 ed.).djvu/22

12 of the facts of perception. The great discrepancy between them, and the fact that neither of them has brought the question to any satisfactory termination, notwithstanding the thorough and sifting manner in which they have discussed and exhausted all the materials before them, can only be accounted for upon this ground. They have certainly made it apparent that the phenomena of perception have never been correctly observed, or faithfully stated: and that is the good which they have done.

But the danger accruing from inattention on the part of man, to the facts revealed to him in the study of himself, is to be seen in its strongest light when reflected from the surface of his moral and practical life. Man takes to pieces only to reconstruct; and he can only reconstruct a thing out of the materials into which he has analysed it. When, therefore, after having analysed himself, he seeks to build himself up again (such a task is self-education), he can only work with the divided elements which he has found. He has nothing else under his hand. Therefore, when any element has escaped him in the analysis, it will also escape him, and not be combined, in the synthesis: and so far he will go forth into the world again shorn of a portion of himself; and if the neglect has involved any important ingredient of his constitution, he will go forth a mutilated skeleton. Such things have often happened in the history of mankind. Speculative inquirers, who, in analysing man (i.e., themselves), or man's actions