Page:The British Controversialist - 1867.djvu/495

6 This penetrating and incisive paper was read with marveling. It threatened to upset the entire labors of the famous "Scottish School," which had wielded such influence in one such praise. The prime tenant of that school was that consciousness cannot misinform, that all it tells is true, and all that we find in it is trustworthy; whereas he maintained that science is the disintegration of the real from the apparent.

Consciousness is the apparent in psychological, as nature is the apparent in physical science; How to each the real has to be brought by thought. Consciousness, like nature must be looked at, into, and through, not from only. Science is the progressive deduction of one truth from another in order sequence. It is the correction of the result of ordinary observation by the criticism of reason, and gaining from these appearances a knowledge of the realities which they involve. In this physics and psychics agree, only that the letter pierces into the appearances more deeply; For "while physical observation is simple, philosophical, or psychological, observation is double. It is observatio duplex; the observation of observation, observatio observationis."

The thoroughness of Ferrier's knowledge of German was proved in August, 1839, in his spirited translation of Ludwick Tieck's "Pietro d'Abano; the Conciliator," a tale of enchantment, and in series of papers on Goethe's life and works, running through several numbers: while, if we mistake not, that critical disquisition "On Hume's Argument against Miracles," in July of the same year, proceeds from the same pen. Of the authorship of another paper in Blackwood, showing an acquaintance with German philosophy, Ferrier has himself accepted responsibility, viz., "The Plagiarisms of S. T. Coleridge," March, 1840. Of the unacknowledged obligations of the author of Biographia Literaria to Schelling (1775-1854) full and accurate details are given in this paper, which, if read in conjunction with a paper by Thomas de Quincy (Works, vol. ii., p. 38-122, with note, p. 242 &c.), will be found to concern a matter not only of philosophical, but also psychological interest.

In 1840 he delivered several lectures in Edinburgh on "War and Peace," and on several other subjects in which the incidence of moral principles on historical and political events could be exhibited. To Blackwood's Magazine, in September 1841, he contributed a translation of Ludwig Franz Deinhardstein's lively art-drama "The Picture of Danae;" and in December, 1841, under the title of the "Tittle-tattle of a philosopher, an epitome of "The Life Journey" of W. T. Krug, the immediate successor of Kant in the chair of Philosophy at Königsberg, and one of the most industrious and versatile German notabilities. On the resignation of professor