Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 3 "Philosophical Remains" (1883 ed.).djvu/397

Rh exists out of the sphere of sense independently of me and all my modifications. How this should be I know not, I merely state the fact as I imagine myself to find it. The modus is beyond my comprehension." This man belongs to the school of Natural Realists. If he merely affirmed or postulated a miracle in what he uttered, we should have little to say against him (for the whole process of sensation is indeed miraculous). But he postulates more than a miracle—he postulates a contradiction, in the very contemplation of which our reason is unhinged.

2. Another man will deny that our sensations ever transcend the sphere of sense, or attain a real objective existence. "Colour, hardness, figure, and so forth," he will say, "are generated within the sphere of sense in obedience to its own original laws. They form integral parts of the sphere; and he who endeavours to construe them to his own mind as embodied in extrinsic independent existences must for ever be foiled in the attempt." This man declines giving any answer to the problem. We ask, How can our, sensations be embodied in distinct permanent realities? And he replies, That they never are and never can be so embodied. This man is an Idealist, or, as we would term him (to distinguish him from another species about to be mentioned of the same genus), an Acosmical Idealist; that is, an Idealist who absolutely denies the existence of an independent material world.