Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 3 "Philosophical Remains" (1883 ed.).djvu/441

Rh. But the admission is, we conceive, a point which has been already and long ago decided. Men must and will philosophise. That being the case, the only alternative left is, that we should discuss the highest problem of philosophy in the terms of the third mode proposed. We have called this the speculative method, which means nothing more than that we should expend upon the investigation the uttermost toil and application of thought; and that we should estimate the truths which we arrive at, not by the scale of their importance, but by the scale of their difficulty of attainment, of their cost of production. Labour, we repeat it, is the standard which measures the value of truth as well as the value of wealth.

A still more cogent argument in favour of the strictly speculative treatment of the problem is this. The problem of perception may be said to be a reversed problem. What are the means in every other problem are in this problem the end; and what is the end in every other problem is in this problem the means. In every other problem the solution of the problem is the end desiderated: the means are the thinking requisite for its solution. But here the case is inverted. In our problem the desiderated solution is the means; the end is the development, or, we should rather say, the creation of speculative thought, a kind of thought different altogether from ordinary popular thinking. "Oh! then," some one will perhaps exclaim, "after all, the whole question