Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 3 "Philosophical Remains" (1883 ed.).djvu/91

Rh philosophy, which, making him at first, and in his earliest stage, the passive recipient of the natural effluences of things, the involuntary effect of some foreign cause, seeks afterwards to engraft freedom upon him; a vain, impracticable, and necessarily unsuccessful endeavour, as the whole history of philosophy, from first to last, has shown.

We are now able to render a distinct answer to the question: What is the precise effect of our argument on the subject of the human mind? Its precise effect and bearing is to turn us to the study of fact—of a clear and a peculiar fact—from the contemplation of an object which is either an hypothesis, or else no object at all (not even an hypothesis but a contradiction), or else an irrelevant object of research, and one which cannot by any conceivability contain the fact which it is our business to investigate. Even granting the human mind to be a real object, still we affirm that our argument, and the state of the fact, show the necessity of our realising and viewing consciousness as something altogether distinct from and independent of it, inasmuch as it is the tendency of every modification of mind to keep this fact or act in abeyance under their supremacy so long as that supremacy continues; and, therefore, it never can be the true and relevant business of philosophy to attend to this object (however real) when engaged in the study of man; because in doing so, philosophy would necessarily miss and overlook the leading, proper, and peculiar phenomenon of his being. The fact of