Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 3 "Philosophical Remains" (1883 ed.).djvu/86

76 notion and the reality of himself as the person experiencing the change. This fact is that which controls and makes him independent of the state experienced; and in the event of the state running into excess, it leaves him not the excuse or apology (which animals have) that he was its victim and its slave. This phenomenon stands conspicuously aloof, and beside it stands man conspicuously aloof from all the various modifications of being by which he may be visited. This phenomenon is the great and leading fact of human psychology. And we now affirm that the inquirer who should neglect it after it had been brought up before him, and should still keep studying "the human mind," would be guilty of the grossest dereliction of his duty as a philosopher, and would follow a course altogether irrelevant; inasmuch as, passing by the phenomenon peculiar to man, he would be busying himself at the best (supposing "mind" to be something more than hypothesis) with facts which man possesses in common with other creatures, and which must of course be, therefore, far inferior in importance and scientific value to the anomalous fact exclusively his. In studying "the human mind," we encounter, whichever way we turn, mere counterfeit, or else irrelevant phenomena, instead of falling in with the true and peculiar phenomena of man; or shall we say that consciousness, like the apples in the gardens of the Hesperides, grows on the boughs of humanity, and grows nowhere else, and that while it is the practical