Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 3 "Philosophical Remains" (1883 ed.).djvu/93

Rh such a discrimination they could not move a step. Very well: man in studying himself follows the same method. He divides himself into subject and object. There is himself, the subject inquiring, and there is "the human mind," the object inquired into. There is here then, at the outset, distinctly two. The principal condition of the inquiry demands that there shall be two. We will suppose then the science of the "object inquired into" to be complete. And now we turn to the man, and say, "Give us a science of the subject inquiring." He answers that he has already done so; that, in this case, the subject and object are identical; and in saying this is it not plain that he violates the very condition upon which his science professed to proceed and to depend, namely, the distinction between subject and object? He now gives up this distinction. He confounds the two together. He makes one of them: and the total confusion and obliteration of his science is the consequence. [Does he again recur to the distinction? then we keep probing him with one or other horn of our dilemma, which we will thus express for the behoof of the "philosophers of mind." Do you, in your science of man, profess to lay down and to found upon the distinction between the subject (yourselves) and the object (the human mind), or do you not? If you do, then we affirm that while studying the object you necessarily keep back in the subject the most important fact connected with man, namely, the fact of consciousness; and that you cannot place