Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 3 "Philosophical Remains" (1883 ed.).djvu/78

68 precisely as we found it, would be to turn it to no account whatsoever, and would allow the metaphysician still to triumph in our failure to accomplish what we have declared to be the true end and business of philosophy. The distinction is espoused by common sense, and is thrown out on the very surface of ordinary language: therefore the presumption that it is correct is in its favour; but it still remains to be philosophically vindicated and made good. Let us, then, accept it faithfully as given; and gently construing it into a clearer form, let us see whether every fact connected with it under its philosophic aspect will not prove it to be the most important and valid of all possible discriminations.

To mark this distinction, this conviction and expression of common sense, by a philosophical formula, let us suppose a line terminating in two opposite poles. In the one of these we will vest "mind," that is, the whole assemblage of the various states or changes experienced—all the feelings, passions, sensations, &c., of man; and in the other of them we will vest the fact of consciousness, and the man himself calling himself "I." Now we admit, in the first instance, that these two poles are mere postulates, and that our postulation of them can only be justified and made good that they are mutually repulsive; by the fact that there is a reciprocal antithesis or antagonism between them, and between all that each of them contains: or, in other words, we must be borne out by the fact, that an increase of