Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 3 "Philosophical Remains" (1883 ed.).djvu/95

Rh upon which the physical sciences found: and the ruin of your science as a physical research (that is, as a legitimate research in the only sense in which you have declared a research can be legitimate) is the result.

The difficulties, then, in the way of the establishment of a science of "the human mind," are insuperable. Its weakness and futility are of a twofold character. It starts with an hypothesis, and yet cannot maintain this hypothesis, or remain consistent with it for a single moment. Man makes a hypothetical object of himself, and calls this "the human mind;" and then, in order to invest it with a certain essential phenomenon, he is compelled every instant to unmake it as an object, and to convert back again into a subject, that is, into himself—a confusion of the most perplexing kind—a confusion which, so long as it is persisted in, must render everything like a science of man altogether hopeless. Such being the state of things, it is indeed no wonder that despair should have settled down upon the present condition, the prospect, and the retrospect of psychological research.

In the second place, let us say one or two words on the subject of "the human mind," itself, before we have done with it. Let us suppose it to be not an hypothesis, but a reality. We will further suppose that all the forms, states, or modifications of this real substance have been separately enumerated and classified in distinct orders; and now we will imagine