Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 3 "Philosophical Remains" (1883 ed.).djvu/534

524 into instantaneous operation, you would have contrasted the objects of sense with those of the imagination, and out of the comparison you would have affirmed the former to be real, the latter unreal. But the question is, Were you distinctly sensible of the unreality, did you disbelieve in the real presence of the objects when the objects were flitting before your mental eye? If I may judge from my own experience, I think your answer must be that you entertained no disbelief in the presence and reality of the objects. I hope, indeed, that in this room you have seldom indulged in such reveries; but in spots better fitted for your day-dreams, by your own fire-sides, on the banks of a running stream, have you never lived for a time in an imaginary landscape and among imaginary faces, entertaining at the same time no clear disbelief in the reality of such scenes? If you have yielded yourselves up to such trains of thought, and if you have not been impressed every instant with a conviction of their unreality, with a belief in the non-existence of all that came before you, then I conceive that you had a virtual and a vital, though not a very distinct or conscious, belief in the existence and in the reality of the objects in the contemplation of which you were absorbed.

7. I think, then, in conclusion, that you must become converts to Mr Stewart's opinion that the exercise of the imagination is in certain circumstances, and under certain conditions, accompanied with the