Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 3 "Philosophical Remains" (1883 ed.).djvu/277

Rh aimed at creating was not the belief in which common sense rejoiced. To the man who thought and felt with the mass, the universe was no hypothesis, no inference of reason, but a direct reality which he had immediately before him. His perception of the universe, that is, the universe as he was cognisant of it in perception, was, he felt convinced, the very universe as it was in itself.

Idealism did not care to conciliate common sense; but it maintained that if we must have recourse to an hypothesis to explain the origin of our perceptions, it would be a simpler one to say that they arose in conformity with the original laws of our constitution, or simply because it was the will of our Creator that they should arise in the way they do. Thus, a real external world called into existence by hypothetical Realism (no other Realism was at present possible), merely to account for our perceptions, was easily dispensed with as a very unnecessary encumbrance.

Scepticism assumed various modifications, but the chief guise in which it sought to outrage the convictions of mankind was, by first admitting the reality of an external world, and then by proving that this world could not correspond with our perceptions of it. Because, in producing these perceptions, its effects were, of necessity, modified by the nature of the percipient principle on which it operated; and hence our perceptions being the joint result of external nature and our own nature, they could not possibly