Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 3 "Philosophical Remains" (1883 ed.).djvu/60

50  their incompatibility or contradictoriness from this conception—a mode of proof which certainly shows that the phenomena cannot inhere in his conception of matter, but which by no means proves that they cannot inhere in matter itself. Or he may follow, as before, an a posteriori course. But here, too, we have already shown that such a procedure is impossible, without his taking for granted the very point in dispute. We have already shown that, in adhering to experience, the immaterialist must first of all go and ascertain the fact respecting these phenomena—do they inhere in matter, or do they not—before he is entitled to predicate that they cannot inhere in it, lest while he is steering his argument in one direction, the fact should be giving him the lie in another. We sum up our statement thus: He wishes to prove that certain phenomena cannot inhere in matter. In proving this he is brought to postulate the fact that these phenomena do not inhere in matter; and then, when pressed for a proof of this latter fact, he can only make it good by reasserting that they cannot inhere in matter, in support of which he is again forced to recur to his old statement that they do not inhere in matter, an instance of circular reasoning of the most perfect kind imaginable. Thus the immaterialist has not given us, and cannot possibly give as, any argument at all upon the subject He has not given us the proof which the "necessity" of the case called for, and which, in admitting the principle of parsimony, he pledged himself to give as the only ground upon which his postulation of a new substance could be justified. He has, after all, merely supplied us with the statement that certain phenomena do not inhere in matter, which is quite sufficiently met on the part of the materialist, by the counter statement that these phenomena do inhere in matter. In struggling to supply us with more than this, his reason is strangled in the trammels of an inexorable petitio principii, from which it cannot shake itself loose: while the materialist looks on perfectly quiescent. All this, however, Mr Stewart totally misconceives. He speaks as if the materialist (of course we mean such as understand and represent the argument rightly) took, or were called upon to take, an active part in this discussion. He imagines that the onus probandi, the task of proving the phenomena to inhere in matter, and of disproving "mind," lay upon his inhere, as altogether unphilosophical; but he and we reject it upon very different grounds. He, indeed, rejected it because he did not consider it at