Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 3 "Philosophical Remains" (1883 ed.).djvu/98

88 consideration, as the feature which distinguished its possessor with the utmost clearness from all other creatures, and as that which would be sure to lead the observer to a knowledge of the true and essential character of the being manifesting it? Would not, in fine, a world entirely new be here opened up to research? And now, if we would really behold such a fact, we have but to turn to ourselves, and ponder over the fact of consciousness; for consciousness is precisely that marvellous, that unexampled fact which we have been here supposing and shadowing forth.

"I never could content my contemplation," says Sir Thomas Browne, "with those general pieces of wonder, the flux and reflux of the sea, the increase of the Nile, the conversion of the needle to the north, and have studied to match and parallel those in the more obvious and neglected pieces of nature which, without farther travel, I can do, in the cosmography of myself. We carry with us the wonders we seek without us. There is all Africa and her prodigies in us. We are that bold and adventurous piece of nature, which he that studies wisely learns in a compendium, what others labour at in a divided piece or endless volume." Let us observe, however, that in studying man it is our duty, as philosophers, and if we would perceive and understand his real wonders, to study him in his sound and normal state, and not in any of the eccentricities or aberrations of his nature. Next to physiological metaphysics, pathological