Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 3 "Philosophical Remains" (1883 ed.).djvu/394

384 X Y and Z lie within the circle; and the question is, by what art or artifice—we might almost say by what sorcery—can they be transplanted out of it, without at the same time being made to overpass the limits of the sphere? There are just four conceivable answers to this question—answers illustrative of three great schools of philosophy, and of a fourth which is now fighting for existence.

1. One man will meet the difficulty boldly, and say—"X Y and Z certainly lie within the circle, but I believe they lie without it. How this should be, I know not. I merely state what I conceive to be the fact. The modus operandi is beyond my comprehension." This man's answer is contradictory, and will never do.

2. Another man will deny the possibility of the transference—"X Y and Z," he will say, "are generated within the circle in obedience to its own laws. They form part and parcel of the sphere; and every endeavour to regard them as endowed with an extrinsic existence, must end in the discomfiture of him who makes the attempt." This man declines giving any answer to the problem. We ask him how X Y and Z can be projected beyond the circle without transgressing its limits; and he answers that they never are, and never can be so projected.

3. A third man will postulate as the cause of X Y Z a transcendent X Y Z—that is, a cause lying external to the sphere; and by referring the former to the latter, he will obtain for X Y Z, not certainly