Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 3 "Philosophical Remains" (1883 ed.).djvu/28

18 she do when brought face to face with such a novelty, such an anomaly as he? Instead of conforming herself to him, she will naturally seek to bend him down in obedience to the early principles she has imbibed. She has subdued all things to herself; and now she will endeavour to end by putting man, too, under her feet. Like a treacherous warrior, who, after having conquered the whole world in his country's cause, returns to enslave the land that gave him birth, Science, coming home laden with the spoils of the universe, will turn her arms against him whose banner she bore, and in whose service she fought and triumphed. By benumbing a vitality she cannot grasp, and by denying or passing by, blindly or in perplexity, a freedom she can neither realise nor explain, she will do her best to bring him under the dominion of the well-known laws which the rest of the universe obeys. But all her efforts ever have been, and ever shall be, unavailing. She may indeed play with words, and pass before us a plausible rotation of "faculties." She may introduce the causal nexus into thought, and call the result "association." But the man himself is not to be found in this "calculating machine." He, with all his true phenomena, has burst alive from under her petrific hand, and leaves her grasping "airy nothings," not even the shadow of that which she is striving to comprehend; for, though she can soar the solar height, and gaze unblinded on the stars, man soars higher still, and, in his lofty region, she