Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 3 "Philosophical Remains" (1883 ed.).djvu/292

282 by the very laws and nature of thought. We used no violence with the question, we made no effort to displace it, that we might bring forward the new question in its room; we merely thought it, and this is the shape which it necessarily assumed. In this new form the question is still the same as the one originally asked; the same, and yet how different!

But though this is the question really asked, it is not the one which the asker really wished or expected to get an answer to. No; what he wished to get explained was the nature of the connection between what was heretofore considered the subjective, and what was heretofore considered the objective part of perception. Now, touching this point, the following is the only explanation which it is possible to give him. Unless we are able to think two things as two and separated from each other, it is vain and unreasonable to ask how they can become one. Unless we are able to hold the subjective and the objective apart in thought, we cannot be in a position to inquire into the nature of their connection. But we have shown that it is not possible for us, by any effort of thought, to hold the subjective and the objective apart; that the moment the subjective is thought, it becomes both the subjective and the objective in one; and that the moment the objective is thought, it becomes both the subjective and the objective in one; and that, however often we may repeat the attempt to separate them, the result is invariably the same; each of the terms, mistakenly supposed to be but a member of