Page:(1856) Scottish Philosophy—The Old and the New.pdf/48

48 that there may be other laws or truths common to all reason besides this single circumstance.

The difficulty of course lies in ascertaining the laws which are binding on all intelligence—the points which reason, considered simply as reason, and not as this or that particular reason—has in common. This task can be accomplished only when the truths in question are presented in the form of distinct proposition, and tested rigorously by the law of contradiction. Their opposites must be seen in every instance to be equivalent to the statement, that a thing is not what it is. This is the task which the Institutes have taken in hand, and executed, no doubt imperfectly when the work is looked at in itself, but with complete success when the objections brought against it by Mr Fraser, and its other reviewers, are attended to.

These remarks may help us establish, or at least to render intelligible, my fundamental principle, and also to show that Mr Fraser's counter-hypothesis, which denies that reason has any common or essential characteristics, is both more precarious and more untenable. I have just to add, that the proposition which declares that all reason is subject to certain necessary laws, is laid down, not for the purpose of affording information in regard to the structure of all intelligence—that is a very subordinate consideration—but as supplying the only ground on which a science of metaphysics is possible. There is no mean between these two alternatives—either no metaphysics, or else this postulate.

Mr Fraser has nowhere asserted, that if my groundwork could be conceded, the conclusions which I draw would not inevitably follow. He finds no fault, so far as I can perceive, with the logic and consistency of my subsequent procedure. Like the friends of Columbus, when he made the egg stand upon its end, he insinuates that my conclusions are no such great matter after all, and that I have overcome no such very formidable difficulties. Nevertheless, I suspect that he and others were previously at a loss how to make the egg stand upon its end. He seems to admit, however, that if I am right at the start, I am right also throughout the course. It is unnecessary, therefore, to follow