Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 3 "Philosophical Remains" (1883 ed.).djvu/413

Rh which gives each man a paramount and indisputable title to that "treasure trove" which he calls his own body. Now, it is only after going through a considerable course of experience and experiment, that we can ascertain what the particular sensations are upon which all our other sensations are dependent. And therefore were we not right in saying that a man's body is not given to him directly and at once, but that he takes a certain time, and must go through a certain process, to acquire it?

The conclusion which we would deduce from the whole of the foregoing remarks is, that the great law of living sensation, the rationale of sensation as a living process, is this, that the senses are not merely presentative, i.e., they not only bring sensations before us, but that they are self-presentative, i.e., they, moreover, bring themselves before us as sensations. But for this law we should never get beyond our mere subjective modifications; but, in virtue of it, we necessarily get beyond them; for the results of the law are—1st, that we, the subject, restrict ourselves to, or identify ourselves with, the senses, not as displayed in their