Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 3 "Philosophical Remains" (1883 ed.).djvu/520

510 nothing, just as mine is absolutely nothing to you; absolutely nothing, that is, on the supposition that we are merely sensational creatures, that sensation, and sensation alone, is what we have been originally endowed with. The whole animated universe may be riotous with enjoyment, or may be plunged in the most agonising torment; but all this is nothing to the separate individuals who compose it. Each of them can be occupied with nothing but its own sensations. None of them can transcend its own particular feelings, because no creature can feel any pains or any pleasures except its own. So much in explanation of what I mean by saying that all sensation is necessarily individual or particular.

18. I have now to speak of the ethics which are founded on the psychology of sensation. It will conduce to distinctness if we regard these ethics as twofold. There is, first, a very simple system which arises when we keep in view the particularity of sensation as I have just explained it to you; and there is, secondly, a very confused system which arises when we lose sight, as the sensational psychologists did, of the fact referred to. We shall confine our attention at present to the first of these ethical systems. It is, as I have said, extremely simple and intelligible, and although exceedingly defective in point of truth, nothing can be more perfect than the logical consistency with the psychological principles on which it is founded. The ethical system in its simplest form which arises