Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 3 "Philosophical Remains" (1883 ed.).djvu/522

512 no sense of theirs, no sense of their felicity or wretchedness. In such a case it is each man for himself and his own interests, not because he dislikes the happiness and desires the misery of his fellows, but because he has, and can have, absolutely no perception of them. He has a perception only of his own weal and of his own woe. The one of these he courts, and the other he wards off under the irresistible compulsion of his nature. And this nature, the only nature which he has, assures him that he is doing right in pursuing the one at all hazards, and wrong in failing at all hazards to eschew the other.

20. It is obvious that these ethics are scarcely entitled to the name of a moral scheme; and it cannot be maintained for a moment that they are applicable to man in his rational maturity. But it is only because man is not a mere sensational creature that they are not applicable to him. Admit with the sensational psychologists that he is this, and these certainly are the only ethics adapted to his condition. They stand in a relation of perfect consistency with the psychology which is their groundwork.

21. Yet, untrue as these ethics are in the main, they present one side on which we may, perhaps, win from them some degree of truth. Let us suppose that man is at first a mere sensational creature, and that his reason and other qualities, although original, do not show themselves until a later period in his