Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 3 "Philosophical Remains" (1883 ed.).djvu/88

78. But we have now to observe that this illustration is not strong enough, and that the two terms of it are not sufficiently contrasted for our purpose. Or, in other words, we now remark that in the case of consciousness and its objects, the rupture or antagonism between the two is far stronger and more striking than in the case of vision and its objects. It is not the tendency of the objects of vision, on the one hand, to quench the vision which regards them; it is not, on the other hand, the tendency of the fact of vision to obliterate the objects at which it looks. Therefore, though the fact of vision and the objects of vision are distinctly separate, yet their disunion is not so complete as that of the fact of consciousness and the objects of consciousness, the natural tendency of which is, on both sides, to act precisely in the manner spoken of, and between which a struggle of the kind pointed out constantly subsists. This, then, we proclaim to be the fact (and upon this fact we ground the essential distinction or antithesis between mind, i.e., the complement of the objects of consciousness, and the fact of consciousness itself), that mind, in all its states, without a single exception, so far from facilitating or bringing about the development of consciousness, actually exerts itself unceasingly and powerfully to prevent consciousness from coming into existence, and to extinguish it when it has come into operation. The fact, as we have said before, is notorious, that the more any state of mind (a sensation or whatever