Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 3 "Philosophical Remains" (1883 ed.).djvu/319

Rh and our perceptions of objects, between things and the appearances of things, a doctrine which, if admitted (and admit it we must, if we use the word only in the application alluded to above), would leave this as the distinction between realism and idealism, that whereas the former separates objects from our perceptions of them for the purpose of preserving the objects, the latter separates the two for the purpose of annihilating the objects. And the truth is, that this is precisely the distinction between spurious realism and spurious idealism. They both found upon the assumed capability of making this abstraction, only they differ, as we have said, herein, that the one makes it in order to preserve the objects, and the other in order to destroy them. But genuine idealism, looking only to the fact, and instructed by the unadulterated dictates of common sense, denies altogether the capability of making the abstraction, denies that we can separate in thought objects and perceptions at all; and hence this system has nothing whatever to do either with the preservation or with the destruction of the material universe; and hence, too, it is identical, in its length, and in its breadth, and in its whole significance, with genuine unperverted realism, which just as stoutly refuses to acknowledge the operation of this pretended faculty. Let us beware, then, of maintaining that man, in his intercourse with the external universe, has only his own perceptions or impressions to deal with. It was this unwary