Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 3 "Philosophical Remains" (1883 ed.).djvu/465

Rh, told ourselves the former of these alternatives; but our better nature, the convictions that we have received from God Himself, assure us that the latter of them is the truth. The latter is by far the simpler, as well as by far the sublimer doctrine. But it is not on the authority either of its simplicity or its sublimity that we venture to propound it; it is on account of its perfect consonance, both with the primitive convictions of our unsophisticated common sense, and with the more delicate and complex evidence of our speculative reason.

When a man consults his own nature in an impartial spirit, he inevitably finds that his genuine belief in the existence of matter is not a belief in the independent existence of matter per se, but it is a belief in the independent existence of the perception of matter which he is for the time participating in. The very last thing which he naturally believes in is, that the perception is a state of his own mind, and that the matter is something different from it, and exists apart in naturâ rerum. He may say that he believes this, but he never does really believe it. At any rate he believes, in the first place, that they exist together, wherever they exist. The perception which a man has of a sheet of paper does not come before him as something distinct from the sheet of paper itself. The two are identical, they are indivisible; they are not two, but one. The only question then is, Whether the perception of a sheet of paper (taken as it must be in its indissoluble totality) is a state of the man's