Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 3 "Philosophical Remains" (1883 ed.).djvu/478

468 apparent; or, as it may be otherwise expressed, between the hidden and the obvious. By the apparent and obvious I mean such facts as lie upon the very surface of things, such phenomena as come before us of their own accord, and require no effort on our part to apprehend them. By the real and the hidden I mean such facts as are not of this obtrusive character, such truths as do not force themselves spontaneously on our observation, but are to be reached and disclosed only by means of an intellectual effort. All science, I say, in the sense of inquiry or higher knowledge, proceeds upon this distinction, because it is plain that science in the sense of inquiry is not required to bring before us the apparent and the obvious, objects or facts of this character being already sufficiently patent without any investigation. Science, therefore, in the proper sense of the word, is directed exclusively upon the real or the hidden; and it takes notice of the apparent and the obvious only that it may pass beyond them into the regions where truth or reality abides. In Platonic Greek, , or opinion, is the term by which the faculty of the apparent is designated, while  designates the faculty by which the real is apprehended.

8. The whole scheme of the natural universe affords illustrations of this distinction between the real and the apparent, on which all science proceeds. If a man, by looking up to the starry heavens, were able, by that mere inspection, to determine the