Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 3 "Philosophical Remains" (1883 ed.).djvu/398

388 3. A third man will postulate as the cause of our sensations of hardness, colour, &c., a transcendent something, of which he knows nothing except that he feigns and fables it as lying external to the sphere of sense: and then, by referring our sensations to this unknown cause, he will obtain for them, not certainly the externality desiderated, but a quasi-externality, which he palms off upon himself and us as the best that can be supplied. This man is a Cosmothetical Idealist; that is, an Idealist who postulates an external universe as the unknown cause of certain modifications we are conscious of within ourselves, and which, according to his view, we never really get beyond. This species of speculator is the commonest, but he is the least trustworthy of any; and his fallacies are all the more dangerous by reason of the air of plausibility with which they are invested. From first to last he represents us as the dupes of our own perfidious nature. By some inexplicable process of association he refers certain known effects to certain unknown causes, and would thus explain to us how these effects (our sensations) come to assume, as it were, the character of external objects. But we know not "as it were." Away with such shuffling phraseology. There is nothing either of reference, or of inference, or of quasi-truthfulness in our apprehension of the material universe. It is ours with a certainty which laughs to scorn all the deductions of logic and all the props of hypothesis. What we wish to know is, how our subjective