Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 3 "Philosophical Remains" (1883 ed.).djvu/318

308 thought of these perceptions with the universe, professedly thought to exist independently of them, you have transgressed the stipulated terms of the question, the conclusion from which is that, in supposing yourself annihilated, you did not suppose yourself annihilated, you took yourself back into being in the very same breath in which you puffed yourself away into nonentity.

We must here beg to guard ourselves most particularly against the imputation of having said that, in thinking of the external universe, man thinks only of his own perceptions of it; or that, when he has it actually present before him, he is conscious only of the impressions which it makes upon him. This is a doctrine very commonly espoused by the idealistic writers. It is a tempting trap into which they have all been too prone to fall; and Berkeley himself, and a man as great as he, Fichte, have not altogether escaped the snare. But it cuts up the very roots of genuine speculative idealism, and controverts the first and strongest principle on which it rests. This principle, we may remind the reader, is that the thing is the appearance, and that the appearance is the thing; that the object is our perception of it, and that our perception of it is the object; in short, that these two are convertible ideas, or, more properly speaking, are one and the same idea. But this use of the word only implies that we possess a faculty of abstraction, in virtue of which we are able to distinguish between objects