Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 3 "Philosophical Remains" (1883 ed.).djvu/474

464 haven. We seem engaged with an inquiry which has neither beginning, middle, nor end; we are embarked on an illimitable ocean which welters with unappeasable controversies; we are gazing on an infinite battle-field, raging with interminable strife. Instead of being what it professes to be, a science which is to settle everything, this science seems to unfix the very foundations of the rational soul, and of the solid universe. Doctrines rise up against doctrines, opinions overwhelm opinions, "velut unda supervenit undam," so that this science which gives itself out as the science of the immutable, seems itself to be the most mutable of filings; whence, not without reason, has it been said that the words which St Peter spake to the lying wife of Ananias may be fitly applied to each philosophy as they successively come upon the field, "Behold, the feet of them which have buried thy husband are at the door, and shall carry thee out."

3. Is then the cultivation of metaphysics to be abandoned in disgust or in despair? Great proficients in the physical sciences, wedded to their own objects and captivated with their own methods, have proscribed it as a vain and illegitimate and unprofitable pursuit. But such a prohibition is founded on an entire miscalculation of the capacities, the aspirations, and the demands of the human soul. To suppose that the light of metaphysics—fitful or lurid or bewildering as it may too often be—can ever be extinguished, is to suppose that man has ceased to have