Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 3 "Philosophical Remains" (1883 ed.).djvu/280

270 altogether. Unless we made some sort of discrimination between our perceptions and outward objects, no consciousness or knowledge would be possible. This principle is one of the laws of human thought, one of the first conditions of intelligence. But we allow it only a relative validity. It gives us but one-half of the truth. We deny that it is an absolute, final, and permanent distinction; and we shall show that, if by one law of intelligence we constantly separate the subject and the object, so by another law we as constantly blend them into one. If by one principle of our nature we are continually forced to make this separation, we are just as continually forced, by another principle of our nature, to repair it. It is this latter principle which is now to engage our research. But here we must have recourse to facts and illustrations; for it is only by the aid of these that we can hope to move in an intelligible course through so abstruse an investigation.

We shall illustrate our point by first appealing to the sense of sight. Light or colour is the proper object of this perception. That which is called, in the technical language of philosophy, the objective, is the light; that which is called, in the same phraseology, the subjective, is the seeing. We shall frequently make use of these words in the sense thus indicated. Now, admitting, in a certain sense, this discrimination between the objective and subjective in the case of vision, we shall make it our business to show that it undoes itself, by each of these terms