Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 3 "Philosophical Remains" (1883 ed.).djvu/67

Rh them. Our great primary aim is to remedy this confusion; to establish the fact of consciousness (and the being to whom it belongs) as something quite aloof from, and transcending, the objects of consciousness, namely, mind and all its states, and then to confine our science entirely to the elucidation of this fact, which will be found to be pregnant with many other facts, and with many mighty results, neglecting the objects of it as of little importance or of none.

There is one ground, however, still left open to the metaphysician, which he may consider his impregnable stronghold or inner fortress, and which, if he can maintain it, will certainly enable him to set our strictures at defiance, and successfully to defend his tenets against all our objections. We are quite willing that he should intrench himself in this strong citadel, and, with his permission, we will place him fairly within it with our own hands, to stand or to fall. The metaphysician, fully admitting the distinction we have been insisting on, may say, "But this discrimination is itself a mere analysis of mind. The 'state' of which the being is conscious is mind; and the fact of consciousness, with the being to whom it belongs, is also mind. In a word, both terms or factors of the analysis are mind. Mind in a state of dualism perhaps; two minds, if you choose to call them so; but still susceptible of synthesis, still capable of having the one of them added to the other of them; and hence, though two, still capable of being