Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 3 "Philosophical Remains" (1883 ed.).djvu/464

454 thus hurry an honest man into a philosophical falsehood.

The question, then, which we have to refer to our natural belief, and abide the answer whatever it may be, is this: Is the perception of matter (taken in its integrity, as it must be taken), is it a modification of the human mind, or is it not? We answer unhesitatingly for ourselves, that our belief is that it is not. This "confession of faith" saves us from the imputation of subjective idealism, and we care not what other kind of idealism we are charged with. We can think of no sort of evidence to prove that the perception of matter is a modification of the human mind, or that the human mind is its proper and exclusive abode; and all our belief sets in towards the opposite conclusion. Our primitive conviction, when we do nothing to pervert it, is, that the perception of matter is not, either wholly or in part, a condition of the human soul; is not bounded in any direction by the narrow limits of our intellectual span; but that it "dwells apart," a mighty and independent system, a city fitted up and upheld by the everlasting God. Who told us that we were placed in a world composed of matter, which gives rise to our subsequent internal perceptions of it, and not that we were let down at once into a universe composed of external perceptions of matter, that were there beforehand and from all eternity, and in which we, the creatures of a day, are merely allowed to participate by the gracious Power to whom they really appertain? We, perversely