we regard it as something which connects us with the universe, or something which can be looked at and examined, as we might look at or examine a thing outside ourselves, and not as that which is necessary to any such examination. 'Is it not enough for a man that he is himself? There can be no dispute about that. I am; what more would I have? What more would I be? Why would I be mind? I am myself therefore let it perish.'
What, then, makes a man what he is? It is the fact of consciousness, the fact which marks him off from all other things with a deep line of separation. It is this and this alone, Ferrier says, this ' human phenomenon,' and not its objects, passions, or emotions, which leads us into pastures fresh and far separated from the dreary round which the old metaphysicians followed. The same discovery, of course, is always being made, though to Ferrier it was new; we are always straying into devious ways, ways that lead us into grey regions of abstraction, and we always want to be called back to the concrete and the real, to the freshness and the brightness of life as it is and lives.
Ferrier from this time onwards, from his youth until his death, kept one definite aim in view: the object of his life was to insist with all his might that our interests must be concentrated on man as he is as man, and not on a mere sum-total of passions and sensations by which the human being is affected. The consciousness of a state of mind is very different from that state of mind itself, and the two must be kept absolutely distinct. 'Let mind have the things which are mind's, and man the things which are man's.' We should, Ferrier says, fling 'mind' and its lumber overboard, busy ourselves with the man and his facts. Man's passions and sensations
