Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 3 "Philosophical Remains" (1883 ed.).djvu/541

Rh keeping it in view we obtain a clue which enables us to understand and appreciate the aim and the works of true speculative thinkers, from Plato downwards. We mistake the views of these philosophers if we suppose that they regarded knowledge as the offspring of the human mind, or ideas as its modifications; on the contrary, they regarded the mind as the offspring of an objective knowledge, a knowledge which existed prior to its existence. They held that ideas moulded and modified the mind, not that it moulded or modified them. For myself, I am disposed to adopt the second of these theories, for if we once accept the psychological theory, we shall never be able completely to eradicate either from our own minds or from those of others the sophistry and the scepticism which for ages have bewildered the world. But the metaphysical theory carries us triumphant over every difficulty.

As an illustration of the difference between the two theories, and of the mode in which sophistry and scepticism are overthrown by the one theory while they are all-powerful against the other, let me appeal to the well-known distinction between right and wrong. You have a mind, says the sophist, a mind to begin with, and this mind of yours makes the distinction between right and wrong. But it does not follow that a distinction which your mind makes is an embodiment of absolute, necessary, and immutable truth. The distinction between right and wrong is doubtless a distinction for you. But