Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 3 "Philosophical Remains" (1883 ed.).djvu/443

Rh settles the entire problem of perception. And yet this is not the right way to go to work. It settles nothing but what all men, women, and children have already settled. The truths thus formally substantiated were produced without an effort; every one has already got from Nature at least as much of them as he cares to have; and therefore, whatever their importance may be, they cannot, with any sort of propriety, be made the subjects of conveyance from man to man. We must either leave the problem altogether alone (a thing, however, which we should have thought of sooner), or we must adopt the speculative treatment. The argument, moreover, contained in the preceding paragraph, appears to render this treatment imperative; and accordingly we now return to it, after our somewhat lengthened digression.

We must take up the thread of our discourse at the point where we dropped it. The crisis to which the discussion had conducted us was this: that the existence of matter could not be believed in at all. The psychological analysis necessarily lands us in this conclusion: for the psychological analysis gives us, for matter, nothing but matter per se. But matter per se is what no man does or can believe in. We are reluctant to reiterate the proof; but it is this: to believe in the existence of matter per se is to believe in the existence of matter liberated from perception; but we cannot believe in the existence of matter liberated from perception, for no power