Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 3 "Philosophical Remains" (1883 ed.).djvu/528

518 absence of this law would have in bringing about a belief in the reality of the objects of the imagination, let us suppose two cases in which this law must necessarily be absent. To suppose two such cases, we must conceive two individuals, the one of whom possesses imagination to the entire exclusion of perception, and the other perception to the entire exclusion of imagination. Let us suppose that the one man has the faculty of external perception, but is totally destitute of the faculty of imagination, or of the power of forming representations of objects not actually present to his senses. No imaginary form, we shall say, ever crossed or ever can cross this person's brain. And let us suppose that the other man has the faculty of imagination vigorously developed; that he lives in a reverie of vivid pictures, but is altogether devoid of the external senses. The phantasmagorias of the imagination are his, but he is cut off by an impassable barrier from all communication with what we call real things.

It is obvious that these two faculties being, according to our supposition, the property of different individuals, no contrast or comparison can be instituted between them and their respective objects. Here the law of contrast must necessarily be absent. Now, this law being absent, I am of opinion that the man of imagination would hold his world to be just as real as the man of perception would hold his to be. Neither of them would have any disbelief in the existence of the objects before them; and where no