Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 3 "Philosophical Remains" (1883 ed.).djvu/236

226 Liberty, will be seen to be given in the development of these two grand epochs of consciousness.

In the first place, then, let us contemplate man in his paradisiacal state. Here we find him created perfect by an all-perfect God, and living in the garden of Eden, surrounded by everything that can minister to his comfort and delight. Truly the lines are fallen to him in pleasant places; and, following his natural biases, his whole being runs along these lines in channels of pure happiness and unalloyed good; good nameless, indeed, and inconceivable, because as yet uncontrasted with evil, but therefore, on that very account, all the more perfect and complete. He lies absorbed and entranced in his own happiness and perfection; and no consciousness, be it observed, interferes to break up their blessed monopoly of him. He lives, indeed, under the strictest command that this jarring act be kept aloof. He has no personality: the personality of the paradisiacal man is in the bosom of his Creator.

Now, however enviable this state of things may have been, it is obvious that, so long as it continued, no conceivable advance could be made towards the realisation of human liberty. Without a personality, without a self, to which his conduct might be referred, it is plain that man could not possess any real or intelligible freedom. All his doings must, in this case, fall to be refunded back out of him into the great Being who created him, and out of whom they really proceeded: and thus man must be left a mere