Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 3 "Philosophical Remains" (1883 ed.).djvu/46

36 may still be a scientific builder of houses and of ships, a builder and a destroyer of cities. He may still subdue to his dominion the beasts of the field, and raise himself to be a ruler over his fellow-men. The reason within him is not his own, yet in virtue of it he may perform works inconceivably wonderful and great. But, with all this, what is he, and what sort of his? Truly the activity of a spoke in an unresting wheel. Nothing connected with him is really his. His actions are not his own. Another power lives and works within him, and he is its machine. You have placed man completely within nature's domain, and embraced him under the law of causality. Hence his freedom is gone, together with all the works of freedom; and, in freedom's train, morality and responsibility are also fled.

Do you answer No to the question just put? Do you say that man's reason is his own, and is not to be referred to any other being? Then I ask you why, and on what grounds do you make this answer? Why, in one instance, do you sign away the reason from the immediate agent, the animal, and fix it upon the Creator, and why in another instance do you confine and attribute it to the immediate agent, the man? Why should the engineer have the absolute credit of his work? and why should not the beaver and the bee? Do you answer that man exhibits reason in a higher, and animals in a lower degree; and that therefore his reason is really his