Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 3 "Philosophical Remains" (1883 ed.).djvu/99

physics, or the study of man as he appears when divested of his usual intellectual health, are the most profitless and false. In preference to such things, it were better for us to go at once and study what Sir Thomas Browne so unceremoniously condemns as far less worthy of admiration than the great wonders of ourselves; "the increase of Nile," "the magnetic needle," "Africa and her prodigies," her magicians, and her impostures. Let us then turn to better things—to the contemplation of a fact in human nature, common indeed, but really miraculous; common, inasmuch as it is the universal privilege of man to evolve it; but miraculous, inasmuch as it directly violates (as shall be shown) the great and otherwise universal law which regulates the whole universe besides: we mean of the law of causality. Oh ye admirers of somnambulism, and other depraved and anomalous conditions of humanity! ye worshippers at the shrine of a morbid and deluded wonder! ye seers of marvels where there are none, and ye blindmen to the miracles which really are! tell us no more of powers put forth, and processes unconsciously carried on within the dreaming soul, as if these were one-millionth part so extraordinary and inexplicable as even the simplest conscious on-goings of our waking life. In the wonders ye tell us of, there is comparatively no mystery at all. That man should feel and act, and bring about all his operations without consciousness, is just what we would naturally and at once expect from the whole