Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 3 "Philosophical Remains" (1883 ed.).djvu/59

Rh the he deduces the inference that these phenomena are incompatible with matter, or cannot inhere in it—a petitio principii almost too glaring to require notice. Or does he reason upon this question a posteriori? In this case he professes to found upon no a priori conception of matter, but to be guided entirely by experience. But experience can only inform us what phenomena do or do not inhere in any particular substance; and can tell us nothing about their abstract compatibility or incompatibility with it. We may afterwards infer such compatibility or incompatibility if we please, but we must first of all know what the fact is, or else we may be abstractly arguing a point one way, while the facts go to establish it in the opposite way. In reasoning, therefore, from experience, the question is not, Can certain phenomena inhere in a particular substance, or can they not? but we must first of all ask and determine this: Do they inhere in it, or do they not? And this, then, now comes to be the question with which the immaterialist, reasoning a posteriori, has to busy himself. Is the negative side of this question to be admitted to him without proof? Are we to permit him to take for granted that these phenomena do not inhere in matter? Most assuredly not. He must prove this to be the case, or else he accomplishes nothing; and yet how is it possible for him to prove it? He can only prove it by showing the phenomena to be incompatible with matter; for if he once admits the phenomena to be compatible with matter, then his postulatum of mind is at once disqualified from being advanced. He has given up the attempt to make manifest that necessity for "mind," which it was incumbent upon him to show.

It is, therefore, absolutely necessary to the very life of his argument that he should stickle for the incompatibility of these phenomena with matter. To prove that these phenomena do not inhere in matter, he must show that they cannot inhere in it: This is the only line of argument which is open to him. But then how is he to make good this latter point? We have already seen the inevitable and powerless perplexity in which he Lands himself in attempting it. He must, as before, adopt one of two courses. He must either recur to his old a priori trick of framing for himself, first of all such a conception of matter, that it would be contradictory to suppose the phenomena capable of inhering in it, and then of rejection of it is of the smallest conceivable importance. Like Dugald Stewart, we reject the question as to the entity in which the admitted