James Frederick Ferrier

“ Let us suppose, then, that we are merely an eye, which, however, as it is not yet either tangible or localised, we shall call the soul, the seer. Let this seer be provided with a due complement of objects, which are mere colours in the form of houses, clouds, rivers, woods, and mountains. Everything is excluded but sight and colours. Nothing but pure seeing is the order of the day. Now, here it is obvious that the seer must pronounce itself or its organ to be precisely commensurate in extent with the things seen. ”

“ People who have no turn for philosophic research are apt to imagine that discussions on the subject of matter are carried on for the purpose of proving something, either pro or con, concerning the existence of this disputed entity. No wonder, then, that they should regard the study of philosophy as a most frivolous and inane pursuit. But we must be permitted to remark that these discussions have no such object in view. Matter and its existence is a question about which they have no direct concern. They are entirely subservient to the far greater end of making us acquainted with our own nature. ”

“ Hence he was a speculator in the truest sense of the word; for speculation is not the art of devising ingenious hypotheses, or of drawing subtle conclusions, or of plausibly manœuvring abstractions. Strictly and properly speaking, it is the power of seeing true facts, and of unseeing false ones; a simple enough accomplishment to all appearance, but nevertheless one which, considered in its application to the study of human nature, is probably the rarest, and, at any rate, has been the least successfully cultivated, of all the endowments of intelligence. ”

“ It is an irreversible law of human thought, that no such idea can be construed to the mind by any effort of the understanding, or rationally articulated by any power of language. We cannot, and we do not think it; we only think that we think it. And upon the basis of this law, and upon it alone, independently of revelation, rests the great doctrine of our immortality. The fear of death is a salutary fear, and the thought of death is a salutary thought, not because we can really think the thought or really entertain the fear, but only because we imagine that we can do so. ”

“ The subsequent progress of philosophy shows how much the science of man is indebted to his researches. He certainly was the first to stamp the indelible impress of his powerful understanding on those principles of our nature, which, since his time, have brightened into imperishable truths in the light of genuine speculation. His genius was the first to swell the current of that mighty stream of tendency towards which all modern meditation flows, the great gulf-stream of Absolute Idealism. ”

“ Now, on the contrary, we hold it to be an undeniable fact (and so does Berkeley) , that all visible objects are seen to be external, and at a distance from one another; that objects at the end of the street, or at the end of the great ranges of astronomy, are all seen to be very far removed from the visible features of our own faces; but we deny that these objects, and our own noses among the number, are seen to be external, or at any distance at all from our own sight; simply for this reason, that our sight is unable to see itself. ”

“ I assent to the veracity of sense, and I believe that the very perception or sensible image is the external object, and on no account whatever will I consent 'to disclaim this principle.' Your philosophy, your more rational opinions, your system of representation, your reasonings which, you say, necessitate me to depart from my primary instincts, all these I give, without reservation, to the winds. ”

“ We have already taken occasion to remark that discussions of the kind we are engaged in, are carried on, not for the sake of any conclusion we may arrive at with respect to the existence or the non-existence of the material universe, but solely for the sake of the laws of human thought which may be evolved in the course of the research. Now, the conclusion to which we are led by the train of our present speculation is this, that no question and no proposition whatever can for a moment be entertained which involves the supposition of our annihilation. ”

“ We appear to ourselves to be able to realise the thought and the fear, and this it is which drives us back so irresistibly into the busy press of life, and weds us so passionately to its rosy forms; we are not able to realise the thought or the fear, and this it is which makes us secretly to rejoice "in the sublime attractions of the grave." ”

“ Time alone weaves a canvas wide enough to do justice to their true proportions; and a few broad strokes is all that the genius of any one man, however gifted, is permitted to add to the mighty and illimitable work. It is therefore no reproach to Berkeley to say that he left his labours incomplete; that he was frequently misunderstood, that his reasonings fell short of their aim, and that he perhaps failed to carry with him the unreserved and permanent convictions of any one of his contemporaries. ”

“ It is plain enough that we cannot generalise them into pure objective existence in itself; we can only generalise them into a knowledge of pure objective existence. But such a knowledge, that is to say, a knowledge of something existing in things, over and above our mere knowledge of them, is not one whit less our knowledge, and is not one whit more their existence, than the other more subjective knowledge designated by the word mere. Our knowledge of extension and figure is just as little these real qualities themselves, as our affection of colour is objective colour itself. ”

“ We think ourselves back, in the very moment in which we think ourselves away.
But, in the second place, suppose that we attempt to answer the question in the negative, and to maintain that the material universe would no longer exist if we and all percipient beings were annihilated; how will this hypothetical conclusion help us out of the difficulty which hampers the very enunciation of the problem? We are aware that this is the favourite conclusion of idealism as commonly understood, and it is a conclusion not altogether uncountenanced by the reasonings of Berkeley himself. ”

“ For what is this brightness and this greenness but an ideal vision, which cannot be thought of unless man's eyesight be incarnated with it in one inseparable conception? Nature herself, we may say, has so beaten up together sight and colour, that man's faculty of abstraction is utterly powerless to dissolve the charmed union. ”

“ How do we come to judge that objects are external to the eye as distinguished from our perception, that they are external to one another, and how do we come to judge that they possess a real magnitude quite different from their visible magnitude? ”

“ This is a doctrine very commonly espoused by the idealistic writers. It is a tempting trap into which they have all been too prone to fall; and Berkeley himself, and a man as great as he, Fichte, have not altogether escaped the snare. But it cuts up the very roots of genuine speculative idealism, and controverts the first and strongest principle on which it rests. This principle, we may remind the reader, is that the thing is the appearance, and that the appearance is the thing; that the object is our perception of it, and that our perception of it is the object ”

“ But this universal and primary opinion of all men is soon destroyed by the slightest philosophy, which teaches us that nothing can ever be present to the mind but an image or perception. So far, then, we are necessitated by reasoning to contradict or depart from the primary instincts of nature, and to embrace a new system with regard to the evidence of our senses. But here philosophy finds herself extremely embarrassed, when she would justify this new system, and obviate the cavils and objections of the sceptics. ”

“ All the secondary qualities, colours, sounds, tastes, smells, heat, hardness, everything, in short, which is an affection of sense, may be generalised at one sweep into our mere knowledge of things. But the primary qualities, which are usually restricted to extension and figure, and which constitute, it is said, the objective or real essence of things, and which are entirely independent of us, into what shall they be generalised? ”

“ He seems to think Berkeley's doctrine to be this: that our visual sensations are mere internal feelings, in which there is originally and directly no kind of outness at all involved, not even the outness of one visible thing from another visible thing; and that this outness is in some way or other suggested to the mind by these internal feelings. "But," says he, "Berkeley's theory demands more than this; for the internal feeling not only suggests the idea of the external object, but by doing so suggests the idea, or, if I may use figure, infuses the perception of its own externality." ”

“ But broaden the basis of the idealistic principle, and see how innocuous this objection falls to the ground; affirm that in the case of every phenomenon, that is, even in the case of the phenomenon of the absence of all phenomena, a subject-mind must be thought of as incarnated with the phenomenon, and the cavil is at once obviated and disarmed. The realist expects the idealist, in virtue of his principle, taken in its narrower significance, to admit that when the percipient neither sees, nor thinks of seeing, trees and houses, there would be no such thing as these objects. ”

“ Non-existence itself is a phenomenon requiring a percipient present to apprehend it, just as much as existence is. No external world is no more no external world without an ideal percipient, than an external world is an external world without an ideal percipient. Therefore, in saying that there would be no external world if man were annihilated, we involve ourselves in precisely the same incapacity of rationally enunciating the question as we did in the former case. ”

“ In mixing up the thought of these perceptions with the universe, professedly thought to exist independently of them, you have transgressed the stipulated terms of the question, the conclusion from which is that, in supposing yourself annihilated, you did not suppose yourself annihilated, you took yourself back into being in the very same breath in which you puffed yourself away into nonentity.
We must here beg to guard ourselves most particularly against the imputation of having said that, in thinking of the external universe, man thinks only of his own perceptions of it ”

“ Thus are the judgments and conclusions of the eye corrected and refuted by the experience of the finger, until, at length, the eye actually believes that it sees things to be larger than itself; a total mistake, however, on its part, as Berkeley was the first to show; for the object which it seems to see as greatly larger than itself, is only suggested by another object which is always smaller than itself. ”

“ It is perfectly true that the existence of matter depends entirely on the presence, that is, either the real or the ideal presence, of a conscious mind. But it does not follow from this that there would be no-matter if no such conscious mind were present or thought of as present, because no-matter depends just as much upon the real or the ideal presence of a conscious mind. Thus are spiked all the cannon of false realism ”

“ And the truth is, that this is precisely the distinction between spurious realism and spurious idealism. They both found upon the assumed capability of making this abstraction, only they differ, as we have said, herein, that the one makes it in order to preserve the objects, and the other in order to destroy them. But genuine idealism, looking only to the fact, and instructed by the unadulterated dictates of common sense, denies altogether the capability of making the abstraction, denies that we can separate in thought objects and perceptions at all ”

“ But do we not see that, in holding this belief, we have violated, at the very outset, the essential conditions of our question? We bound ourselves to annihilate the percipient in thought, to keep him ideally excluded from the scene, and having done this, we professed ourselves ready to believe and maintain that the universe would preserve its place and discharge its functions precisely the same as heretofore. ”

“ It is only when we can make a comparison between two or more colours that we can say that they are seen to be external—i.e., external to each other. But if there were no colour but one before us, not being able to make any comparison, we should be unable by sight to form any judgment at all about its outness, or to say that we saw it to be out of anything. ”

“ Just because both of us have subreptitiously restored the knowledge of extension in denying that extension itself would be annihilated. The knowledge of extension is extension, and extension is the knowledge of extension. Perhaps, in continuation, you will say, we have our own ideas, the secondary qualities are in truth our own ideas; but that besides these we have an idea of something existing externally to us which is not an idea, and that this something forms the aggregate of the primary qualities. ”

“ According to him Berkeley's doctrine is, that not only the tangible outness of objects, or their distance from the eye, is not immediately perceived by sight, but that not even their visible outness or their distance from one another is so perceived. ”

“ Outness is not immediately perceived by sight, but only suggested to our thoughts by certain visible ideas and sensations attending vision. Berkeley (he continues) thus in fact represents the visual perception of objects as external, to be an instance of the association of ideas. If, however, he had dearly analysed the process in question, he would have perceived the fallacy into which he had fallen. It is impossible that the law of mind, by which one thing suggests another, should produce any such effect as the one ascribed to it. ”