Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 3 "Philosophical Remains" (1883 ed.).djvu/94

84 this fact in the object of your research without doing away the distinction upon which you founded. But if you do away this distinction, you renounce and disregard the vital and indispensable condition upon which physical science depends: and what, then, becomes of your science as a research conducted, as you profess it to be, upon the principles of physical investigation? You may, indeed, still endeavour to accommodate your research to the spirit of physical inquiry by talking of a subject-object; but this is a wretched subterfuge, and the word you here make use of must ever carry a contradiction upon its very front. You talk of what is just as inconceivable to physical science as a square circle or a circular square. By "subject," physical science understands that which is not an "object," but something opposed to an object, and by "object," that which is not a "subject," but something opposed to a subject: and can form no conception of these two as identical. But by "subject-object" you mean a subject which becomes an object—i.e., its own object. But this is inconceivable, or, at any rate, is only conceivable on this ground, that the subject keeps back in itself, itself and the consciousness of what is passing in the object; because if it invests itself, and the fact of consciousness in the object, the object from that moment ceases to be an object, and becomes reconverted into a subject, that is, into one's self without an object. This, at least, is quite plain: that in talking of a subject-object, you abandon the essential distinction