Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 3 "Philosophical Remains" (1883 ed.).djvu/81

Rh a man out of himself, is closely and philosophically correct. Properly interpreted, it means that the man is taken completely out of the pole where consciousness abides, and vested entirely in the opposite pole where passion dwells; or rather we should say that as a man he is extinct, and lives only as a machine. In both of these cases the men lose their personality. They are played upon by a foreign agency.

But as yet they know not how mean and how miserable they are. Consciousness must return to them first, and only they themselves can bring it back; and when it does return, the effect of its very first approach is to lower the temperature of the sensation and of the passion. The men are not now wholly absorbed in the state that prevailed at the sensual and passionate pole. The balance is beginning to right itself. They have originated an act of their own, which has given them some degree of freedom; and they now begin to look down upon their former state as upon a state of intolerable slavery; and ever as this self-reference of theirs waxes, they look down upon that state as more and more slavish still, until at length, the balance being completely reversed and lying over on the other side, consciousness is again enthroned, the passion and the sensation are extinguished, and the men feel themselves to be completely free.