Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 3 "Philosophical Remains" (1883 ed.).djvu/92

82 consciousness, expressed in the word "I," and its accompanying facts, such as the direct and vital antithesis subsisting between it and passion, sensation, &c., these are the only facts which psychology ought to regard. This science ought to discard from its direct consideration every fact which is not peculiarly man's. It ought to turn away its attention from the facts subsisting at what we have called the sensitive, passionate, and rational pole of humanity; because these facts are not, properly speaking, the true and absolute property of humanity at all; and it ought to confine its regards exclusively to the pole in which consciousness is vested; and, above all things, it ought to have nothing to do with speculations concerning any transcendent substance (mind, for instance) in which these phenomena may be imagined to inhere.

Let us conclude this chapter by shortly summing up our whole argument and its results, dividing our conclusions into two distinct heads: 1st, concerning the "science of the human mind;" and 2d, concerning the "human mind" itself.

In the first place, does the science of the human mind profess to follow the analogy of the natural sciences? It does. Then it must conform itself to the conditions upon which they depend. Now, the primary condition upon which the natural sciences depend and proceed, is the distinction between a subject and an object; or, in other words, between a Being inquiring, and a Being inquired into.