Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 3 "Philosophical Remains" (1883 ed.).djvu/87

Rh duty of all men, as well as the great aim of philosophy, to grasp and realise this rare and precious fact, it has ever been the practice of "the human mind," like the dragon of old, to guard this phenomena from the scrutiny of mankind; to keep them ignorant or oblivious of its existence; to beat them back from its avenues into the mazes of practical as well as speculative error, by raising its blinding and deceitful aspect against any hand that would pluck the golden fruitage.

Does the reader still desire to be informed with the most precise distinctness why the fact of consciousness, and we ourselves, cannot be conceived of as properly and entirely vested in "mind"? Then let him attend once more to the fact, when we repeat what we have already stated: perilling our whole doctrine upon the truth of our statement as fact, and renouncing speculation altogether. In a former part of this discussion we illustrated the distinction between the objects of consciousness (the passions, namely, and all the other changes or modifications we experience) and the fact of consciousness, by the analogous distinction subsisting between the objects of vision and the fact of vision. It was plain that the objects of vision might exist, and did exist, without giving birth to, or being in any way accompanied by, the fact of vision; and in the same way it was apparent that the objects of consciousness by no means brought along with them the fact of consciousness as their necessary and invariable