Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 3 "Philosophical Remains" (1883 ed.).djvu/517

Rh knowledge from without. All knowledge and all ideas are ultimately resolvable into sensations. Thoughts and conceptions are merely faint and transformed sensations.

14. Such is sensationalism in its most extreme form as propounded by some of the French metaphysicians of the last century. Locke, by admitting reflection as well as sensation to be a source of our ideas, had previously taught a modified form of this doctrine. But still, even in Locke's system, reflection holds a subordinate place, and sensation is with him the chief and dominant, if not the sole original capacity of the human mind.

15. Before proceeding to consider the ethics which arise out of this system, we must examine carefully the nature of sensation. We must investigate and ascertain its character as a psychological phenomenon before we can judge of it as the basis of an ethical hypothesis. The characteristics of sensation are twofold. First, it is either pleasurable or painful; secondly, it is individual or particular. On the first of these points little requires to be said. Some degree of pleasure or of pain is involved in all our sensations. It may be thought that some of them are neutral or indifferent. But this indifference seems either to be a mixture of pleasure and pain in which these balance each other, or else it is a state of ease and tranquillity brought about in some other way.