Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 3 "Philosophical Remains" (1883 ed.).djvu/76

66 down, refrain from doing this gross violence to his expressions, because, if we were guilty of it, we should consider ourselves upon the point of falling into great errors, and of confounding a most essential distinction which has not escaped the primitive and almost instinctive good sense of all mankind, the genus metaphysicorum excepted. This tribe will not admit that in using the expression, for instance, "my sensations," the man regards himself as standing aloof from his sensations: or at any rate they hold that such a view on the part of the man is an erroneous one. They will not allow that the man himself and the fact of consciousness stand on the outside of the sphere of the "states of mind" experienced: but they fetter him down within the circle of these states, and make him and consciousness identical with them.

In opposition to this, the ordinary psychological doctrine, we, for our part, prefer to adhere to the language of common sense; believing that this represents the facts faithfully and truly, while the formulas of metaphysics misrepresent them grievously. We affirm that the natural man, in using the words "my mind," expresses and intends to express what is, and what he feels to be, the fact—namely, that his conscious self, that which he calls "I" (ego), is not to be confounded, and cannot be confounded, with his "mind," or the "states of mind," which are its objects. Let Us observe, he merely views "mind," and uses this word, as a term expressing the aggregate or general assemblage of these states, and connects with