Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 3 "Philosophical Remains" (1883 ed.).djvu/399

Rh can be, not as it were, but in God's truth and in the strict, literal, earnest, and unambiguous sense of the words, real independent, objective existences. This is what the cosmothetical idealist never can explain and never attempts to explain.

4. We now come to the answer which the reader who has followed us thus far will be prepared to find us putting forward as by far the most important of any, and as containing in fact the very kernel of the solution. A fourth man will say, "If the whole sphere of sense could only be withdrawn inwards, could be made to fall somewhere within itself, then the whole difficulty would disappear and the problem would be solved at once. The sensations which existed previous to this retraction or withdrawal, would then of necessity fall without the sphere of sense (see our second diagram), and in doing so they would necessarily assume a totally different aspect from that of sensations. They would be real independent objects, and (what is the important part of the demonstration) they would acquire this status without overstepping by a hair's-breadth the primary limits of the sphere. Were such phraseology allowable, we should say that the sphere has understepped itself, and in doing so has left its former contents high and dry, and stamped with all the marks which can characterise objective existences."

Now the reader will please to remark, that we are very far from desiring him to accept this last solution at our bidding. Our method, we trust, is