error." "Are we to suppose that the real revolutions of the celestial spheres differ widely from their apparent courses, and that the same great law does not hold rule, and may not be found out, in the movements of human thought—that mightier than planetary sphere?" "Metaphysic is the substitution of true ideas—i.e., of necessary truths of reason—in the place of oversights of popular opinion and the errors of psychological science." "It carries on a warfare by compulsion, not assuredly by choice. So soon as man is born with true and correct notions about himself and all other things, Philosophy will take her departure from the world, for she will be no longer needed." " If philosophy were a science which aimed merely at the positive establishment of certain truths of its own, without having for its vocation to challenge and put right the fundamental verdicts of man's natural judgment, the study of it might, not unreasonably, be declined on the ground that, by the exercise of our ordinary faculties, we were already in possession of as much truth as we wanted, or as was good for us. If truth comes to us spontaneously, why should we not be satisfied with it? why should we fatigue ourselves in the pursuit of any other truth than that which comes to us from nature? Why, indeed? But what if no truth, what if nothing but error comes to us from nature? what if the ordinary operation of our faculties involves us in interminable contradictions? . . . In that case, it is conceived that the usefulness of philosophy, as corrective of these spontaneous fallacies, and as emendatory of the inherent infirmities of the human intellect, cannot be too highly estimated, or its study too earnestly recommended."
We have purposely made the foregoing quotations the introduction to this paper because, containing as they do a thorough-going assertion at once of the value of philosophy and the imperativeness of controversy, they should form a justification for the frequency with which we place metaphysical papers before our readers; and they ought to conciliate towards their author the favourable regards of British Controversialists who know how much, yet how unjustly, discussion is contemned and condemned. Their author was a bold, consistent, and persistent thinker, the sinewy vigour of whose mind, the relentless rigour of whose reasoning, and the pellucid clearness of whose style make him a man of mark among metaphysicians. He was at once ingenious and ingenuous, a hater of every byepath either in thinking or in life. In terse, vehement, yet logical polemic, he had no philosophical match except Sir William Hamilton; who was less popular, poetical, and fascinating than he. Ferrier would not swerve from truth, palter with conscience or equivocate at the solicitation of a sect "for a king's ransom;" no, nor for what he valued more, a philosoher's renown. If we endeavour to understand this man, whose love for truth was so ardent, whose capacity for research was so great, and whose passionate pursuit of it cost him much, we may learn not only a great deal regarding metaphysical speculations, and the forms of reasoned
