Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 3 "Philosophical Remains" (1883 ed.).djvu/285

Rh hearing, with their appropriate objects, light and sound, sufficiently explains and illustrates our point. For what holds good with regard to them, holds equally good with regard to all our other perceptions. The moment the objective part of any one of them is thought, we are immediately constrained by a law of our nature which we cannot transgress, to conceive as one with it the subjective part of the perception. We think objective weight only by thinking the feeling of weight. We think hardness, solidity, and resistance, in one and the same thought with touch or some subjective effort. But it would be tedious to multiply illustrations; and our doing so would keep us back too long from the important conclusion towards which we are hastening. Every illustration, however, that we could instance would only help to establish more and more firmly the great truth, that no species or form of the objective, throughout the wide universe, can be conceived of at all, unless we blend with it in one thought its appropriate subjective—that every objective, when construed to the intellect, is found to have a subjective clinging to it, and forming one with it, even when pursued in imagination unto the uttermost boundaries of creation.

Having seen, then, that the objective (the sum of which is the whole external universe) necessarily becomes when thought, both the objective and subjective in one, we now turn to the other side of the question, and we ask whether the subjective (the sum of which is the whole mind of man) does not