Page:Ferrier Works vol 2 1888 LECTURES IN GREEK PHILOSOPHY.pdf/308

Rh a thinking being, and thought is more properly the man himself than sensation. This is his , and this , I admit, is more authoritative than any , than any convention or agreement among men. But what does this nature enjoin? What are the ethics of nature now when thought is taken into account as forming the principal part of man's nature? They must be very different from the ethics evolved out of a psychology which either takes no notice of thought, or resolves it into a mere form or product of sensation. They must enjoin something very different from what is enjoined by the code of Sophistical or sensational morality, and they do enjoin something very different. The ethics of sensation say, Follow out your sensations, gratify them to the full, and at all hazards please your appetites and your desires to the uttermost, for sensation and its adjuncts, appetite and desire, constitute the true nature of man. But my code of ethics (I still suppose Socrates speaking), my code of ethics say no. Thought is the true nature of man. Therefore you must follow out what thought involves and what thought prescribes, for then alone will you be obeying that  which, on your own showing, is the most obligatory and authoritative of all things. But if thought be the essence of man, the essence of thought, as has been already sufficiently explained, is freedom, is a liberation from sensation, appetite, and desire. Thought is itself, as we have seen, a disengagement from these, not that man in thinking is ever without sensation of one kind or