Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 3 "Philosophical Remains" (1883 ed.).djvu/307

Rh the brain, this crotchet-world of philosophers, and against it alone, that all the attacks of Berkeley were directed. The doctrine that the realities of things were not made for man, and that he must rest satisfied with their mere appearances, was regarded, and rightly regarded by him, as the parent of scepticism, with all her desolating train. He saw that philosophy, in giving up the reality immediately within her grasp, in favour of a reality supposed to be less delusive, which lay beyond the limits of experience, resembled the dog in the fable, who, carrying a piece of meat across a river, let the substance slip from his jaws, while, with foolish greed, he snatched at its shadow in the stream. The dog lost his dinner, and philosophy let go her secure hold upon the truth. He therefore sided with the vulgar, who recognise no distinction between the reality and the appearance of objects, and, repudiating the baseless hypothesis of a world existing unknown and unperceived, he resolutely maintained that what are called the sensible shows of things are in truth the very things themselves.

The precise point of this polemic between Berkeley and the philosophers, is so admirably stated in the writings of David Hume, that we feel we cannot do justice to the subject without quoting his simple and perspicuous words; premising, however, that the arch-sceptic had his own good reasons for not doing full justice to his great forerunner. Nothing indeed