Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 3 "Philosophical Remains" (1883 ed.).djvu/197

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philosophy of consciousness.
187

Without employing the word "will," then, let us look forth into the realities of man, and perhaps we shall fall in with the reality of it when we are never thinking of the word, or troubling ourselves about it; perhaps we shall encounter the phenomenon itself, when the expression of it is the last thing in our thoughts; perhaps we shall find it to be something very different from what we suspected; perhaps we shall find that it exists in deeper regions, presides over a wider sphere, and comes into earlier play than we had any notion of.

The law of causality is the great law of nature. Now, what do we precisely understand by the law of causality? We understand by it the keeping up of an uninterrupted dependency throughout the various links of creation; or the fact that one Being assumes, without resistance or challenge, the state, modification, or whatever we may choose to call it, imposed upon it by another Being. Hence the law of causality is emphatically the law of virtual surrender or assent.

    hand, adopt it; and, without looking for the realities themselves independently of the words, they endeavour to lay hold of the realities solely through the words; they seek to extract the realities out of the words, and, consequently, their labours are in a different subject-matter, as dead and worthless as those of the poetaster. Both classes of imitators work in an inverted order. They seek the living among the dead: that is, they seek it where it never can be found. Let us ask whether one inevitable result, one disadvantage of the possession of a highly cultivated language, is not this: that, being fraught with numberless associations, it enables poetasters and false philosophers to abound, inasmuch as it enables them to make words stand in place of things and do the business of thoughts?