Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 3 "Philosophical Remains" (1883 ed.).djvu/316

We bound ourselves to annihilate the percipient in thought, to keep him ideally excluded from the scene, and having done this, we professed ourselves ready to believe and maintain that the universe would preserve its place and discharge its functions precisely the same as heretofore. But in thinking of the bright sky, and of the green grass, and of the loud thunder, and of the solid earth, we have not kept him excluded from the scene, but have brought back in thought the very percipient being whom we supposed, but most erroneously supposed, we had abstracted from his place in the creation. For what is this brightness and this greenness but an ideal vision, which cannot be thought of unless man's eyesight be incarnated with it in one inseparable conception? Nature herself, we may say, has so beaten up together sight and colour, that man's faculty of abstraction is utterly powerless to dissolve the charmed union. The two (supposed) elements are not two, but only one, for they cannot be separated in thought even by the craft of the subtlest analysis. It is God's synthesis, and man cannot analyse it. And further, what is the loud thunder, and what is the sounding sea, without the ideal restoration of the hearing being whom we professed to have thought of as annihilated? And finally, what is the solidity of the rocks and mountains but that which is conceived to respond to the touch and tread of some human percipient, ideally restored to traverse their unyielding and everlasting heights?