Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 3 "Philosophical Remains" (1883 ed.).djvu/435

Rh the separation, namely, of the perception of matter into perception and matter per se. The sceptic accepts this analysis. His business is simply to accept, not to discover or scrutinise principles. Having accepted the analysis, he then denies that any belief attaches to the existence of matter per se. In this he is quite right. But he cannot, consistently with his calling, exhibit the ground of his denial; for this ground is, as we have shown, the impossibility of performing the analysis, of effecting the requisite disengagement. But the sceptic has accepted the analysis, has admitted the disengagement. He therefore cannot now retract: and he has no wish to retract. His special mission, his only object, is to confound the principle which he has accepted by means of the reaction of its consequences. The inevitable consequence which ensues when the analysis of the perception of matter is admitted is the extinction of all belief in the existence of matter. The analysis gives us a kind of matter to believe in to which no belief corresponds. The sceptic is content with pronouncing this to be the fact without going into its reason. It is not his business to correct, by a direct exposure, the error of the principle which the dogmatist lays down, and which he accepts. The analysis is the psychologist's affair; let him look to it. Were the sceptic to make it his, he would emerge from the sceptical crisis, and pass into a new stage of speculation. He, indeed, subverts it indirectly by a reductio ad absurdum. But he does not say that he