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 may be referred to 'mind' indeed, but he cannot lay his hands upon the fact of consciousness. That fact cannot be conceived of as vested in the _object_ called the 'human mind,' an object being something really or ideally different from ourselves. In speaking of 'my mind,' mind may be what it chooses, but the consciousness is in the _ego_; and mind is really destitute of consciousness, otherwise the _ego_ would necessarily be present in it. The dilemma is as follows: 'Unless the philosophers of mind attribute consciousness to mind, they leave out of view the most important phenomena of man; and _if_ they attribute consciousness to mind, they annihilate the object of their research, in so far as the whole extent of this fact is concerned.' Since Ferrier's time this point has been worked out very fully, and by none more successfully than by an English philosopher, Professor T. H. Green of Oxford, in his Introduction to the works of Hume. But when Ferrier wrote, his ideas were new; in England at least he was breaking up ground hitherto untouched, and therefore the debt of gratitude we owe him is not small, especially when we consider the forces against which he warred. 'Common-sense,' the solution offered for all philosophic difficulties, is really the _problem_ of philosophy, and to speak of the 'philosophy of common-sense' is simply to confuse the problem with its solution. Common-sense, or rather what is given by its means, has simply to be construed into intelligible forms: in itself it makes no attempt to solve the difficulties that present themselves, and it is folly to suggest its doing so. When a man speaks of _my_ sensations or _my_ states of mind, he means something of which he--as consciousness--is independent, and which can be made an object to him. Were it not so, of course he could not possibly arrive at freedom, but would merely be the helpless child of destiny; and, as Ferrier points out, were consciousness and sensation one, consciousness would not have the power, undoubtedly possessed by it, of 'recovering the balance' that it loses on experiencing pain or passion; the return of consciousness, as he puts it, 'lowers the temperature' of the sensation or the passion, and the man regains the personality that for the time had almost vanished.