Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 3 "Philosophical Remains" (1883 ed.).djvu/289

again be understood to coalesce. Like magicians with but half the powers of sorcery, they had spoken the dissolving spell which severed man's mind from the universe, but they were unable to articulate the binding word which again might bring them into union. It was reserved for the speculation of a later day to utter this word. And this it did by admitting in limine the distinction; but, at the same time, by showing that each of the divided members again resolves itself into both the factors, into which the original whole was separated; and that in this way the distinction undoes itself, while the subjective and the objective, each of them becoming both of them in one thought, are thus restored to their original indissoluble unity. An illustration will make this plain. In treating of mind and matter and their connection, the old philosophy is like a chemistry which resolves a neutral salt into an acid and an alkali, and is then unable to show how these two separate existences may be brought together. The new philosophy is like a chemistry which admits, at the outset, the analysis of the former chemistry, but which then shows that the acid is again both an acid and an alkali in one; and that the alkali is again both an alkali and an acid in one: in other words, that instead of having, as we supposed, a separate acid and a separate alkali under our hand, we have merely two neutral salts instead of one. The new philosophy then shows that the question respecting perception answers itself in this way, that there is no occasion for