Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 3 "Philosophical Remains" (1883 ed.).djvu/27

Rh resembles the analytic poulterer who slew it to get at them in a lump, and found nothing for his pains. Leave the mind to its own natural workings, as manifested in the imagination of the poet, the fire and rapid combinations of the orator, the memory of the mathematician, the gigantic activities and never-failing resources of the warrior and statesman, or even the manifold powers put forth in everyday life by the most ordinary of men; and what can be more wonderful and precious than its productions? Cut into it metaphysically, with a view of grasping the embryo truth, and of ascertaining the process by which all these bright results are elaborated in the womb, and every trace of "what has been" vanishes beneath the knife; the breathing realities are dead, and lifeless abstractions are in their place; the divinity has left its shrine, and the devotee worships at a deserted altar; the fire from heaven is lost in chaotic darkness, and the godlike is nothing but an empty name. Look at thought, and feeling, and passion, as they glow on the pages of Shakespeare. Golden eggs, indeed! Look at the same as they stagnate on the dissecting-table of Dr Brown, and marvel at the change. Behold how shapeless and extinct they have become!

Man is a "living soul;" but science has been trained among the dead. Man is a free agent; but science has taken her lessons from dependent things, the inheritors and transmitters of an activity, gigantic indeed, but which is not their own. What then will