Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 1 - Institutes of Metaphysic (1875 ed.).djvu/128

100PROP. II.———— 3. The ascertainment of the condition of knowledge as fixed in Proposition I. necessarily effects a great change in our conception of the object of knowledge. This change is expressed in Proposition II. But in our ordinary moods we regard the object of knowledge as something very different from what this proposition sets forth. Whatever it may be, we regard it as that thing or thought without anything more—without that addition which we call the subject or the me. Heretofore our conception of the object was the conception of object sine alio; now it is the conception of object cum alio, i.e. mecum.

4. The change which the condition of knowledge effects upon the object of knowledge may be further understood by considering how very different the speculative enumeration of ourselves and things as based on Proposition II., is from the way in which we usually but erroneously enumerate them. We are cognisant of ourselves and of a number of surrounding objects. We look upon ourselves as numerically different from each of these things, just as each of them is numerically different from its neighbours. That is our ordinary way of counting. The speculative computation is quite different. Each of the things is always that thing plus me. So that supposing the things to be represented by the figures 1, 2, 3, 4, and ourselves by the figure 5, while