A BIOGRAPHY IN A PHILOSOPHY.* PROFESSOR FERRIER'S philosophical writings are
in one respect almost unique. They are a biography. Unlike many men—Locke, Reid, Hegel, and we must add, Kant, for example,—in whom the logical understanding seemed to be fenced off from all the other .outlets of character by a dead wall of abstractions created by itself, Ferrier lived a life of intense conviction, around which all his activities circled. What lights up his speculations with a lustre very uncommon in metaphysical disquisition is the white- beat glow of earnest faith, which, like the flame behind a dull transparency, gives life to the cold abstractions of the intellect. The peculiar attraction of his writings, which has so often been attributed to excellence of mere literary form, should, in part at least, be traced to this source. One recent writer indeed does full justice to this element when he says of Ferrier's works, "They are more a confession of faith than a philosophy, an elabo- ration of convictions rather than a system of thought. True, his philosophy was formally reasoned, but notwithstanding the weight its author laid on this quality, its value for humanity does not lie in its reasonings, but in its appeals to belief in a loftier element in man than sense."
If we seek a logical unity in Ferrier's thinking, we find instead a mere show of exact demonstration, which, carefully followed up, leads us to no clear standing-ground, but, circling round, ends as it began, in a mirage of hypothesis. Of all great thinkers, he appears to us most closely to resemble Fichte, although, of course, there are differences likewise very marked and distinctive. Both had a logic restlessly keen and clear, but to which both were afraid of wholly trusting themselves ; both were powerfully acted upon by conflicting philosophies, which only led them to seize with the more concentrated eagerness that to which they seemed deter- mined by something more like unphilosophic instinct than meta- physical acumen ; both elaborated their philosophy with a constant reference to this individual test, and with an enthusiastic ardour such as is held to suit the practical reformer better than the
Lectures on Greek Philosophy, and other Philosophical Remains of James F. Perrier, .II.d. Oxon., LL. D., and late Professor of Moral Philosophy at St. Andrew's. Two vols. London and Edinburgh: W. Blackwood and Sons.
philosophic mind ; and both so frequently cleared the straight lines of intellectual proof by somersaults of intuition, that they have alike sacrificed an historical place in philosophy. The chief interest of the writings of both is personal ; we cannot see the philosopher apart from the man. Their influence is intense, but effective only in a narrow circle, whose centre is upon the circumference of the philosophical sphere ; the German was a sociologist more than a metaphysician, the Scotsman was a littdra- teur earnestly exercising himself with the problems of philosophy, and his works may have value as literature when they have ceased to have any as philosophy.
Men, it has been said, are born Platonists or Aristotelian; idealists or materialists. If ever a man was born an idealist it was Professor Ferrier. Mr. Lewes somewhere sets it down, in his clear, axiomatic way, that a philosophy can only be suc- cessfully assailed from within ; that only one who has received the doctrines of a system may hope to combat them successfully, or rectify them where deficient. Mr. Ferrier's relation to the com- nwn-sense philosophy of Scotland is of such a purely negative kind that he is neither its disciple nor its enemy. Looked at from this point of view, some of the harsh passages levelled at the Institutes of Metaphysic might well have been spared. Neither in their method nor in the great assumption on which they are based, and in which common sense was taken by a coup only to be set free again, do they find a single meeting-point with the careful induction of Reid, or in the remotest way affect it. The slightest consideration of Ferrier's relation to the old Scottish philosophy will establish this point, and give us a good position from which to regard these Remains. As might be expected, the difference between them closes in the very central point of metaphysical discussion as viewed by the Scottish school. In the doctrine of consciousness Ferrier does not part from Reid and Hamilton upon a merely outside and subsidiary matter, but upon a question relating to fundamentals—the essence of the nature of knowledge. This bold divergence exhibits itself with surprising clearness in Mr. Ferrier's first effort—his Introduction to the Philosophy of Consciousness. And he is throughout self-consistent. To the last sentence of the Institutes no approach is made to shaking hands with his Scottish brethren over the disputed field of the fundamental dicta of consciousness. Let us see the extent of their difference.
With the old Scottish philosophers consciousness was held to include all our mental acts ; it was in fact the common tie by which sensations, cognitions, thoughts, were held together as expressions of one personality. What could be traced back to its source as a primitive datum of consciousness was accepted as a an ultimate fact of belief and knowledge, capable neither of being doubted nor proved. Hence the name of common-sense applied to the Scottish philosophy—a term whose bearing here must be strictly distinguished from the signification of worldly prudence it has in common English speech. The whole problem before Reid, when he set himself to meet the assaults of Hume, consisted in restoring to their primal validity these deliverances of conscious- ness. By carrying to its last application the logic of Locke, the sceptic had reduced them to the most precarious condition, in declaring that since we knew ideas only, and ideas ex hypothesi separated from matter, we were just as likely to be deceived in the other relation ; and ideas being separate entities from mind as well as from matter, there was no ground for holding the real existence of the former, any more than of the latter.
On the foundation laid by Reid all his followers built, Hamilton having believed himself to have found in it a stable root for his great doctrine of the relativity of human knowledge, by which he was able to hold the field of the religious instincts against the subtler attacks of German idealism and in face of the hardest siege. But here Ferrier differs from all the Scotch philosophers. He admits, of course, that in consciousness we have the constitutive fact of human intelligence, but in tracing out its genesis he deve- lops ideas startlingly novel. Personality, he holds, is found in consciousness, but this consciousness does not lie in the synthesis of our " mental states," or in any sequence from them ; it exists not by including or comprehending them in any sense, but by the unceasing opposition in which it places itself to all such states and conditions. Here we have the secret of his standing quarrel with psychology ; the tendency of which has all along been to assimi- late mind with matter under the law of causality. This posi- tion leads Ferrier to lay down and to support the strangest paradoxes, by which he offends common sense in accepting only so much that he may vault over it into a foreign field of ideas. Consciousness, according to him, is always in the inverse ratio of the intensity of any state, the maximum of the one being
the minimum of the other. The last logical result of this position is the annihilation of the very personality which he would estab- lish. Personality, like the absolute Being of Hegel, is thus reduced to a mere relation between Past and Future,—a con- stant becoming. And since Ferrier finds the absolute of all know- ledge in the essential interdependence of subject and object,—a universal law, a necessary truth, under which Existence is wholly absorbed in the experience of the mind perceiving, by the contin- gent element of knowledge being carefully distinguished and elimi- nated,—we have an ideal pantheism only different from that of Hegel in so far as it is demonstrated. The conditions of our know- ing become the necessities of all knowing : out of the very limita- tions which our intuitions tell us are imposed upon our formal thinking, by the contradictions that overtake the most evident truths of life when followed to their logical ultimates, Mr. Ferrier by the alembic of an axiom educes the essence of Being itself. But these contradictions return with all their force whenever an appeal is made from Mr. Ferrier's boasted demonstration to the facts of common life, and in this lies the strength of Reid's philosophy against that of Ferrier. A seeing man does not begin to doubt the validity of ally portion of his knowledge because another man is blind, nor does a deaf man because he hears of another who is both blind and deaf ; nor do we ourselves ever dream of having sacrificed our rationality by holding to the belief in an Unknown Existence. The strength of Ferrier's system, after all, lies in his arbitrary appropriation of certain ultimate facts as a starting-point, though, like some other great fighters, he destroys the bridge after he has passed over it, and, at the same time, so overcharges what he has carried with him that it explodes in his hands. All return, too, is impossible, save by intellectual suicide.
These inconsistencies of Ferrier's system seem to have arisen from his desire to recover from the extreme schools on either side that personality and moral freedom on which he set such high value. He hated psychology, because he regarded it as tending to reduce man to a mere aggregate of powers held like any material thing in the bonds of cause and effect, and though him- self an idealist, he is careful to respect the common sense of man- kind at the very points where the great idealists before him had most outraged it. Ingenious as he is, however, he has only suc- ceeded in, so to speak, setting one-half of man's mental beliefs against the other ; and it is only in the practical results of his system, in the demonstration of God, Immortality, and Free-will from the iron necessities of thinking (only a higher form of causality after all, a point on which Spinoza, too, is confused) that his philosophy really recovers its interest.
Ferrier is no doubt right in the prominence he gives to the fact of consciousness differing from any and all our states of mind ; for this is a primitive datum of consciousness itself, embodied in the ordinary phrases—my sensations, my thoughts, my feelings, and so far appropriated as a base in the philosophy of Reid. But common instinct does not countenance his setting of consciousness and our states of mind into direct an- tagonism, in order to develop a fictitious Ego. It is a mere refinement of the speculative sense, the most exhaustive analysis failing to find any foundation for such a shadowy dualism. For if the maximum of any state is the minimum of consciousness, and vice versa, and if the Ego is developed by the antagonism of the two, then the Ego itself must be in constant flux and movement. Perhaps it was to get rid of this difficulty on the one side that Mr. Ferrier was led to deny consciousness to animals, and even to infants, though certainly he does not get rid of it on the other side. The demonstration in which he delighted had, we believe, the effect of blinding him to such contradictions as these ; since the assumption of certain axioms, resting purely on a formal basis, and fortified by a dummy wall of contradictories, enabled him to evade with all appearance of completeness and consistency the necessary contradictions, which are at once pre- sented by oar common beliefs in face of any knowledge assumed to be absolute. The relativity of knowledge, for instance, is proved by the very expedient to which Ferrier is put to get rid of it ; for does not the object in the very act of conception change its cha- racter in identification with the subject knowing.
The most prominent portion of these Remains are the lec- tures on Greek philosophy. They are fresh, vigorous, acute, deriving their main value from the lights of his own philosophy with which he seeks to illumine the dark places of earlier Greek thinking. His distinction between necessary and contin- gent, between the particular and the universal in truth, which lies at the very root of his system, here finds beautiful illustration ; and though sometimes, as iu the case of Plato, we feel that we are listening to an exposition of Ferrier through Plato, yet it is
this personal element which gives the peculiar charm and interest. It was a favourite expression of Ferrier's that the " speculations of antecedent thinkers" must be "verified in the consciousness" of him who would interpret and expound them ; and certainly no man ever made the attempt more earnestly or in a more thorough- going way than he did. To follow Ferrier in the ingenious wind- ings of his demonstration is one of the best mental gymnastics we know of ; it is at once healthy and stimulating; and to such of our readers as love metaphysical ingenuity and learning we recom- mend these volumes—a worthy monument erected to one who was an acute and disinterested thinker, if not a great one.
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