James Frederick Ferrier

“ Let us, then, look abroad into the universe once more, and there, throughout "all that it inherit," mark, if we can, the absence of some fact which is to be found conspicuously present in man.
Continuing, then, our survey of the universe, we behold works of all kinds, and of surpassing beauty, carried on. Mighty machinery is everywhere at work; and on all sides we witness marvellous manifestations of life, of power, and of reason. The sun performs his revolution in the sky, and keeps his appointed pathway with unwearied and unerring foot, while the seasons depend upon his shining. ”

“ The earth flattered thee, and the smiling heavens flattered thee into forgetfulness. Thou wert nature's favourite, but at the same time her fettered slave.
But thy destiny was to be free;—to free thyself—to break asunder the chains of nature—to oppose thy will and thy strength to the universe, both without thee and within thee—to tread earth and the passions of earth beneath thy feet; and thy first step towards this great consummation was to dissolve the strong, primary, and natural synthesis of sensation. ”

“ Long as the sun shone, their love basked beautiful beneath it, and wore smiles of eternal constancy; but when the storm arose, then Hatred, which had been overlooked by Consciousness, arose also, and the place of Love knew it no more. Justice worked well so long as every one got what he himself wanted. But no sooner were the desires of any man thwarted, than Injustice, which Consciousness had laid no restraint upon, stretched out her hand and snatched the gratification of them ”

“ Thus, then, we see that philosophy, when she gets her due—when she deals fairly by man, and when man deals fairly by her; in short, when she is rightly represented and understood, loses her merely theoretical complexion, and becomes identified with all the best practical interests of our living selves. She no longer stands aloof from humanity, but, descending into this world's arena, she takes an active part in the ongoings of busy life. Her dead symbols burst forth into living realities—the dry rustling twigs of science become clothed with all the verdure of the spring. ”

“ What application, then, has it to the subjects we are engaged in discussing; and, in particular, what assistance does it afford us in clearing up the great fact of Human Liberty—that key-stone in the arch of humanity, without which all our peculiar attributes, morality, responsibility, law, and justice, loosened from their mighty span, would fall from their places, and disappear for ever in the blind abysses of Necessity? ”

“ Let us spurn from us the creed of nature, together with the fatalistic logic by which it is upheld. If we admit the logic we must admit the creed, and if we admit the creed we must admit the logic; but let us tear both of them in pieces, and scatter their fragments to the winds. The creed of nature concludes simply for enjoyment; but the truer creed of human life, a creed which says little about happiness, was uttered soon after the foundations of the world were laid, and has been proved and perpetuated by the experience of six thousand years. ”

“ All the germs that nature has planted in his breast owe their growth to her breath, and, unfolding themselves beneath it, they flourish in blessedness—for a time.
Hence this view of human life being the first to present itself to observation, the genius of physical science has ever been foremost to attempt to fix the position of man in the scale of the universe, and to read to him his doom. She tells thee, O man, that thou art but an animal of a higher and more intelligent class—a mere link, though perhaps a bright one, in the uninterrupted chain of creation. ”

“ But it has been asked again and again, in reference to these two solulutions, can a man overstep the limits of himself—of his own consciousness? If he can, then says the querist, the reality of the external world is indeed guaranteed; but what an insoluble, inextricable contradiction is here: that a man should overstep the limits of the very nature which is his, just because he cannot overstep it! And if he cannot, then says the same querist, then is the external universe an empty name—a mere unmeaning sound; and our most inveterate convictions are all dissipated like dreams. ”

“ But the man himself is not to be found in this "calculating machine." He, with all his true phenomena, has burst alive from under her petrific hand, and leaves her grasping "airy nothings," not even the shadow of that which she is striving to comprehend; for, though she can soar the solar height, and gaze unblinded on the stars, man soars higher still, and, in his lofty region, she has got waxen wings, that fall to pieces in the blaze of the brighter sun of human freedom. ”

“ Then what was the whole of the enlightened jurisprudence, and all the high philosophy of antiquity, but so many indications of consciousness in its practical antagonism against human depravity? What is justice, that source and concentration of all law? Is it a natural growth or endowment of humanity? Has it, in its first origin, a positive character of its own? No; there is no such thing as natural or born justice among men. Justice is nothing but the consciousness of our own natural injustice, this consciousness being, in its very essence, an act of resistance against the same. ”

“ But still, with all this, it is what may be termed but a one-sided universe; under one view it is filled to the brim with life and light. Under another view it is lying within the very blackest shadow of darkness and of death. The first view is a true one, because all the creatures it contains are, indeed, alive, and, revelling in existence, put forth the most wonderful manifestations of reason. ”

“ Does not experience teach us, that much if not the whole of our sentient nature becomes itself in turn a series of sensations? Does not the sight—that power which contains the whole visible space, and embraces distances which no astronomer can compute—does it not abjure its high prerogative, and take rank within the sphere of sense—itself a sensation—when revealed to us in the solid atom we call the eye? Here it is the touch which brings the sight within, and very far within, the sphere of vision. ”

“ Thou must work, it may be with pain and difficulty, but, at the same time, with a seeing soul, and a full consciousness of what thou art about. Nature fills thy heart with passions, and tells it to find its happiness in giving way to them. But, out of consciousness, conscience has germinated; and thou sayest unto thyself, that passion is to be trodden under foot. In the midst of thy afflictions, nature lends thee no support, no comfort except the advice that thou shouldst yield to them. Obey her dictates, and thou shalt sink into the dust ”

“ Thus, if we start from mind as a given substance, we, of course, are compelled to make this, in the first instance, passive, and only active through a species of reaction. But the ego is never passive. Its being is pure act. To hold it passive is to hold it annihilated. It is for ever acting against the fatalistic forces of nature. Its free and antagonist power shows itself equally to the eye of reflection in our simplest perceptive as in our highest moral acts. It lives, and has a being, only in so far as it refuses to bow under the yoke of causality ”

“ In revealing to man the strife, which, in the very act of consciousness, exists between himself and his whole natural man, philosophy, of course, brings him to entertain the desire that this strife should be composed. But the desire that this strife should be composed, is itself nothing but a seeking of the kingdom of heaven. It is no desire on man's part to give up the fight, to abandon the resistance of evil, but it is a determination to carry this resistance to its uttermost issues, and then, through Divine assistance, to get this resistance embodied in positive and enduring good. ”

“ What is philosophy? Look at man struggling against the fatalistic logic of physics, and thou shalt best know what philosophy is. In the hands of physical science man lies bound hand and foot, and the iron of necessity is driven into the innermost recesses of his being; but philosophy proclaims him to be free, and rends away the fetters from his limbs like stubble-withs. Physical science, placing man entirely under the dominion of the law of causality, engulfs his moral being in the tomb ”

“ Drift on, then, thou epicurean, thou child of nature, passive in thy theory and thy practice, and sheathed in what appears to be an irrefragable logic, and see where thy creed will land thee!
But perhaps man has been armed by nature with weapons wherewith to fight against the natural powers that are seeking to enslave him. As if nature would give man arms to be employed against herself—as if she would lift with her own hands the yoke of bondage from his neck. ”

“ The balance is beginning to right itself. They have originated an act of their own, which has given them some degree of freedom; and they now begin to look down upon their former state as upon a state of intolerable slavery; and ever as this self-reference of theirs waxes, they look down upon that state as more and more slavish still, until at length, the balance being completely reversed and lying over on the other side, consciousness is again enthroned, the passion and the sensation are extinguished, and the men feel themselves to be completely free. ”

“ In studying "the human mind," we encounter, whichever way we turn, mere counterfeit, or else irrelevant phenomena, instead of falling in with the true and peculiar phenomena of man; or shall we say that consciousness, like the apples in the gardens of the Hesperides, grows on the boughs of humanity, and grows nowhere else, and that while it is the practical duty of all men, as well as the great aim of philosophy, to grasp and realize this rare and precious fact, it has ever been the practice of "the human mind," like the dragon of old, to guard this phenomena from the scrutiny of mankind ”

“ Surely Mr Bailey did not expect that the young man was to perceive visible things to be in his visible body. Surely he does not think that the hands of Berkeley's argument would have been strengthened by any such preposterous revelation. Surely he is not such a crude speculator as to imagine that the mind is in the body, like the brain, the liver, or the lungs; and that to bear out Berkeley's theory, it was necessary that the visible universe, of which the visible body is a part, should be seen to be in this mind internal again in its turn to the visible body. ”

“ What but the struggle between consciousness and cowardice?—a struggle by and through which the latter was dragged into light and vanquished—and then the hero went forth into the thickest ranks of danger, strong in the consciousness of his own weakness, and as if out of very spite of the natural coward that wished to hold him back, and who rode shaking in his saddle as he drove into the hottest of the fight. Natural courage, depending upon temperament, will quail at times, and prove faithless to its trust; the strongest nerves will often shake, in the hour of danger, like an aspen in the gale ”

“ At his birth he is indeed wholly nature's child; for no living creature is born an alien from the jurisdiction of that mighty mother. Powerless and passive, he floats entranced amid her teeming floods. She shapes his passions and desires, and he, disputing not her guardianship, puts his neck beneath their yoke. All that he is, he is without his own co-operation: his reason and his appetites come to him from her hand, he accepts them unconsciously, and goes forth in quest of his gratifications in blind obedience to the force that drives him. ”

“ In ourselves, as well as in nature, a certain given series of phenomena is presented to our observation, but in studying the objects of nature, we add no new phenomenon to the phenomena already there;—whereas, on the contrary, in studying ourselves we do add a new phenomenon to the other phenomena of our being—we add, to wit, the fact that we are thus studying ourselves. Be this new phenomenon important or unimportant, it is, at any rate, evident that in it is violated the analogy between physics and philosophy—between the study of man and the study of nature. ”

“ Still, compared with the actual rise and development of consciousness, these dim and uncertain preludes of it are even more faint and indistinct than are the first feeble rays which the sun sends up before him, compared with the glory which fills heaven and earth when the great luminary himself bursts above the sea. ”

“ Nature prompts a purely epicurean creed, and the logic of physical science binds it down upon the understandings of men; for suppose that we should turn and fight against the force that drives us. But how can we, says the logic of physics? We are in everything at the mercy of a foreign causality, and how can we resist its sway? We are drifting before the breath of nature, and can the wave turn against the gale that is impelling it, and refuse to flow? ”

“ And truly this fact is well worthy of our regard, and one which will worthily reward our pains. It is a fact of most surpassing wonder; a fact prolific in sublime results. Standing aloof as much as possible from our acquired and inveterate habits of thought; divesting ourselves as much as possible of our natural prepossessions, and of that familiarity which has blunted the edge of astonishment, let us consider what we know to be the fact; namely, that existence, combined with intelligence and passion in many instances, but unaccompanied by any other fact, is the general rule of creation. ”

“ The convictions of common sense repudiated the decrees of so hollow a philosophy. The belief which this system aimed at creating was not the belief in which common sense rejoiced. To the man who thought and felt with the mass, the universe was no hypothesis— no inference of reason—but a direct reality which he had immediately before him. His perception of the universe—that is, the universe as he was cognizant of it in perception—was, he felt convinced, the very universe as it was in itself. ”

“ What effect has the absence of consciousness upon the universe? Does it empty the universe of existence? Far from it. Nature is still thriving, and overflowing with life throughout all her kingdoms. Does it empty the universe of intelligence? ”

“ To act according to thy inclinations may be enjoyment; but know that to act against them is liberty, and thou only actest thus because thou art really free. For thy freedom does not merely consist in the power to follow a certain course, or to leave it unfollowed, but it properly consists in the single course of originating a new movement running counter to all the biases which nature gives thee, and in rising superior to the bondage thou wert born in. I will unwind from around thee, fold after fold, the coils of the inert logic of causality ”

“ For, supposing man not to be originally free, let us ask how is the end of human liberty to be attained? Is it to be attained by passively imbibing the various impressions forced upon us from without? Is it to be attained by yielding ourselves up in pliant obedience to the manifold modifications which stamp their moulds upon us from within? Unquestionably not. All these impressions and modifications constitute the very badges of our slavery. They are the very trophies of the causal conquests of nature planted by her on the ground where the true man ought to have stood, but where he fell. ”