Ferrier made his début as a metaphysician in a series of articles in Blackwood in the years 1838-39, bearing the title “An Introduction to the Philosophy of Consciousness.” In these articles he condemns previous philosophers for ignoring in their psychological investigations the fact of consciousness, which is the distinctive feature of man, and coufining their observation to the so-called “states of the mind.” By doing so, he says, they allowed freedom, will, morality, and all man’s peculiar attributes to crumble away. It is wrong to apply the method of physical research to the problems of psychology, for the psychologist must act or create the great phenomenon which he has to observe. Consciousness only comes into manifestation when the man has used the word “I” with full knowledge of what it means. This notion he must originate within himself. Consciousness cannot spring from the states which are its object, for it is in antagonism to them. It originates in the will, which in the act of consciousness puts the “I” in the place of our sensations. Morality, conscience, and responsibility are necessary results of consciousness.
A number of articles on philosophical subjects intervened between the above and the publication of the Institutes. The “Crisis of Modern Speculation,” contributed in 1841, is a decided advance upon his earlier articles, and evinces a more correct appreciation of the particular element in thought. He there states the problem of philosophy to be the nature of the connexion between the mind of man and the external universe, and he solves the question, not by giving it a positive answer, but by changing its aspect. The question as formerly put becomes under his hands meaningless, for mind and universe, subject and object, are shown to be not two, but merely moments in one reality. Think the object, and it becomes subject-object. Think the subject, and it becomes subject-object. So that the question really asked is, “What is the connexion between the subjective subjectobject and the objective subjective-object ί” “What is the connexion between one thing which thought cannot construe as really two ?” As results of this mode of stating the question, to which the mere thinking it necessarily leads, perception is removed from the sphere of cause and effect, and the grounds of dogmatic realism and dogmatic idealism are subverted. “Berkeley and Idealism” (1842) is a further exposition of absolute idealism, and contains some foreshadowings of the later teaching of the Institutes on the subject of “Agnoiology.”
In an article on the publication of Hamilton’s edition of Reid (1847), which contains a vigorous attack on the philosophy of common sense, the perception of matter is pronounced to be the ηe plus ultra of thought, and Reid, for presuming to analyse it, is declared to be a representationist in fact, although he professed to be an intuitionist. A distinction is made between the “perception of matter” and “our apprehension of the perception of matter.” Psychology vainly tries to analyse the former. Metaphysic shows the latter alone to be analysable, and separates the subjective element, “our apprehension,” from the objective element, “the perception of matter,”—not matter per se, but the perception of matter is the existence independent of the individual’s thought. It cannot, however, be independent of thought. It must belong to some mind, and is therefore the property of the Divine Mind. There, he thinks, is au indestructible foundation for the α priori argument for the existence of God.
Ferrier’s matured philosophical doctrines find expression in the Institutes of Metaphysics. Therein he claims to have met the twofold obligation resting on every system of philosophy, that it should be reasoned and true. His method is that of Spinoza, strict demonstration, or at least an attempt at it. All the errors of natural thinking and psychology must fall under one or other of three topics :— Knowing and the Known, Ignorance, and Being. These are all-comprehensive, and are therefore the departments into which philosophy is divided; for the sole end of philosophy is to correct the inadvertencies of ordinary thinking. Hence it must be polemical.
The problems of knowing and the known are treated in the “Epistemology or Theory of Knowing,” under a series of twenty-two propositions and counter-propositions. Each proposition contains a philosophic truth, and the corresponding counter-proposition expresses the error of ordinary thinking regarding it. The truth that alvng with whatever any intelligence knows it must, as the ground or condition of its knowledge, have some cognizance of itself is the basis of the whole philosophical system; and, variously stated through a series of propositions, it leads to the conclusion that the only independent universe which any mind can think of is the universe in synthesis with some other mind or ego.
The leading contradiction which is corrected in the “Agnoiology or Theory of Ignorance” is this, that there can be an ignorance of that of which there can be no knowledge. Ignorance is a defect. But there is no defect in not knowing what cannot be known by any intelligence, and therefore there can be an ignorance only of that of which there can be a knowledge, i.e., of some-object^o⅛s-some-subject, Ferrier lays special claim to originality for this division of the Institutes.
The “Ontology or Theory of Being” forms the third and final division of the Institutes. It contains a discussion of the origin of knowledge, in which Ferrier traces all the perplexities and errors of philosophers to the assumption of the absolute existence of matter. The conclusion arrived at is that the only true real and independent existences are minds-together-with-that-which-they-apprehend, and that the one strictly necessary absolute existence is a supreme and infinite and everlasting mind in synthesis with all things.
Ferrier’s works are perhaps the best propaedeutic to the study of metaphysics in the English language. He has Berkeley’s charm of style, while he surveys philosophical questions from a more advanced standpoint. His philosophic insight was true from the first. Notwithstanding his disavowal of any indebtedness to the German philosophers, his writings are imbued with the spirit of German metaphysics; and he has the merit of being the first to question the right of Dr Reid and his school to dominate the thought of Scotland. Others have arisen more potent than he to read the riddle of the great German he admired so much; yet those who seek a knowledge of the philosophy of the absolute will do wisely not to neglect the works of Ferrier.
A collected edition of Ferrier’s philosophical works, edited by his son-in-law Sir Alexander Grant, and Professor E. L. Lushington, was published in 1866. This edition contains Ferrier’s earlier contributions to Blackwood, a few miscellaneous lectures, the biographies of Schelling and Hegel contributed to the Imperial Dictionary of Universal Biography, some papers supplementary to the Institutes of Metaphysics, and the lectures in Greek philosophy which he delivered to his class. In 1875 there was brought out a three-volume edition of Ferrier’s philosophical works, including, along with the above, the Institutes of Metaphysics, of which two editions had been published in the author’s lifetime one in 1854, and a second in 1856.
FERRIER, Susan Edmonston (1782-1854), Scottish novelist, born in Edinburgh in 1782, was the aunt of the subject of last notice. Her father was James Ferrier, for some years factor to the duke of Argyll, and at one time one of the clerks of the court of session with Sir Walter Scott. Her mother was a Miss Coutts, the beautiful daughter of a Forfarshire farmer. Miss Ferrier’s first novel, Marriage, was begun in concert with a friend, Miss Clavering, grand-daughter of the duke of Argyll; but this lady soon relinquished her share in the work, and Marriage, completed by Miss Ferrier alone, appeared in 1818, when its authoress was between five and six and thirty. It was followed in 1824 by The Inheritance, a better constructed and more mature work; and the last and perhaps best of her novels, Destiny, dedicated to Sir Walter Scott (who himself undertook to strike the bargain with the publisher Cadell), appeared in 1831. All these novels were published anonymously; but, with their clever portraiture of contemporary Scottish life and manners, and even recognizable caricatures of some social celebrities of the day, they could not fail to become popular north of the Tweed, and many were the conjectures as to their authorship, which was by some attributed to Scott himself. Thus, in the Nodes Λmbrοsiance (November 1826), the Shepherd mentions The Inheritance, and adds, “which I aye thought was written by Sir Walter, as weel’s Marriage, till it spunked out that it was written by a leddy.” Scott himself gave Miss Ferrier a very high place indeed among the novelists of the day. In his diary (March 27, 1826), criticizing a new work which he had been reading, he says, “The women do this better. Edgeworth, Ferrier, Austen, have all given portraits of real society far superior to anything man, vain man, has produced of the like nature.” Another friendly recognition of Miss Ferrier is to be found at the conclusion of his Tales of my Landlord, where Scott calls her his “sistershadow,” the still anonymous author of “the very lively work entitled Marriage.''
Lively, indeed, all Miss Ferrier’s works are,—written in a clear, brisk English, and with an inexhaustible fund of humour. It is true her books portray the eccentricities, the follies, and foibles of the society in which she lived, caricaturing with terrible exactness its hypocrisy, boastfulness, greed, affectation, and undue subservience to public opinion. Yet Miss Ferrier wrote less to reform than to amuse. With an honest aversion to these things herself, she wished, not to lecture her readers, but to laugh with them. In this she is less like Miss Edgeworth than Miss Austen. Miss Edgeworth was more of a moralist; her wit is not so involuntary, her caricatures not always so good-natured. But Miss Austen and Miss Ferrier were genuine humorists, and with Miss Ferrier especially a keen sense of the ludicrous was always dominant. She could be serious, she could be pathetic, she could even touch some of the finest chords in human nature; but she never interfered with the depths of human wickedness and misery. She liked best to laugh; she turned naturally to the humorous, and her humorous characters are always her best. It was no doubt because she felt this that in the last year of her life she regretted not having devoted her talents mere exclusively to the service of religion, not taking into account then how much good she had involuntarily done, and how much harmless pleasure she had distributed about her; for, if she was not a moralist, neither was she a cynic; and her wit, even where it is most caustic, is never uncharitable.
Miss Ferrier lived till 1854, more than twenty years after the publication of her last work. The most pleasant picture that we have of her is in Lockhart’s description of her visit to Scott in May 1831. She was asked there to help to amuse the dying master of Abbotsford, who, when he was not writing Count Robert of Paris, would talk as brilliantly as ever. Only sometimes, before he had reached the point in a narrative, “it would seem as if some internal spring had given way.” He would pause, and gaze blankly and anxiously round him. “I noticed,” says Lockhart, “the delicacy of Miss Ferrier on such occasions. Her sight was bad, and she took care not to use her glasses when he was speaking; and she affected to be also troubled with deafness, and would say, ‘ Well, I am getting as dull as a post; I have not heard a word since you said so-andso,’—being sure to mention a circumstance behind that at which he had really halted. He then took up the thread with his habitual smile of courtesy—as if forgetting his case entirely in the consideration of the lady’s infirmity.”
Miss Ferrier died, November 5, 1854, at her house No. 38 Albany Street, Edinburgh. She left among her papers a short unpublished article, entitled “Recollections of Visits to Ashestiel and Abbotsford.” This is her own very interesting account of her long friendship with Sir Walter Scott, from the date of her first visit to him and Lady Scott at Ashestiel, where she went with her father in the autumn of 1811, to her last sad visit to Abbotsford in 1831. It contains some impromptu verses written by Scott in her album at Ashestiel.
