Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 1 - Institutes of Metaphysic (1875 ed.).djvu/121

RhPROP. I.———— and thus converts the unintelligible into the intelligible—the world of nonsense into the world of intellect.

17. This doctrine has been strangely misunderstood. Its expositors have usually thought that: things are already numbered by nature either as one or many, and that all that Pythagoras taught was that we re-number them when they come before us; as if such a truism as that could ever have fallen from the lips of a great thinker; as if such a common-place was even entitled to the name of an opinion. A theory which professes to explain how things become intelligible must surely not suppose that they are intelligible before they become so. If a man undertakes to explain how water becomes ice, he must surely not suppose that it already is ice. He must date from some anterior condition of the water—its fluidity, for instance. Yet the Pythagorean theory of number as the ground of all intelligibility, is usually represented in this absurd light. Number, by which "thing" becomes intelligible, either as one or many, is believed to be admitted by this theory to be cleaving to "thing" even in its unintelligible state. Were this so, the thing would not be unintelligible, and there would be no explanation of the conversion of the incogitable (the anoetic) into the cogitable (the noetic), the very point which the theory professes to explicate.