Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 3 "Philosophical Remains" (1883 ed.).djvu/41

Rh which is called 'I' is a living reality, and though mind were annihilated, it would remain a repository of given facts. But that which is called mind is truly an object only in a fictitious sense, and being so is, therefore, only a fictitious object, and consequently the science of it is also a fiction and an imposture."

"How, then, do you propose to establish a science of ourselves?"

In the first place, by brushing away the human mind, with all its rubbish of states, faculties, &c., for ever from between ourselves and the universe around us: and then by confining our attention exclusively to the given fact of consciousness. Dr Reid was supposed to have done philosophy considerable service by exploding the old doctrine of ideas. By removing them he cut down an hypothesis, and brought 'mind' into immediate contact with external things. But he left the roots of the evil flourishing as vigorously as ever. He indeed lopped no more than a very insignificant twig from a tree of ignorance and error, which darkened, and still darkens, both the heavens and the earth. Until the same office which he performed towards ideas be performed towards 'mind' itself, there can be neither truth, soundness, nor satisfaction in psychological research. For 'the human mind' stands between the man himself and the universe around him, playing precisely, only to a greater and more detrimental extent, the part of that hypothetical medium which ideas before the time of Dr Reid played between it and outward objects.