Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 3 "Philosophical Remains" (1883 ed.).djvu/290

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the crisis of modern speculation.

thought to explain how that may be united into one, which no effort of thought is able to put asunder into two.

By appealing to the facts of our intelligence, then, we have found that, whenever we try to think what we heretofore imagined to be the purely objective part of any perception, we are forced, by an invincible law of our nature, to think the subjective part of the perception along with it; and to think these two not as two, but as constituting one thought. And we have also found that, whenever we try to think what we heretofore imagined to be the purely subjective part of any perception, we are forced by the same law of our nature, to think the objective part of the perception along with it; and to think these two, not as two, but as constituting one thought. Therefore the objective, which hitherto, through a delusion of thought, had been considered as that which excluded the subjective from its sphere, was found to embrace and comprehend the subjective, and to be nothing and inconceivable without it; while the subjective, which hitherto, through the same delusion of thought, had been considered as that which excluded the objective from its sphere, was found to embrace and comprehend the objective, and to be nothing and inconceivable without it. We have now reached the very acme of our speculation, and shall proceed to point out the very singular change which this discovery brings about, with regard to the question with which we commenced these remarks, the question