Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 1 - Institutes of Metaphysic (1875 ed.).djvu/130

102PROP. II.———— knowledge might take place without this condition being complied with.

6. This counter-proposition is grounded on a rock, if the first counter-proposition be true; but without this stay it has no support whatever. If it were possible for an intelligent being to apprehend anything without complying with the condition which declares that he must apprehend himself as well, it would, of course, be possible for him to know an object without knowing anything more—i.e., without knowing himself along with it. But the first counter-proposition is false, because it contradicts Proposition I., which is a necessary and axiomatic truth of reason; and, therefore, the second counter-proposition, which depends entirely upon the first counter-proposition, must likewise be set aside as false and contradictory. It is scarcely necessity to call attention to the circumstance, that the maintenance of the second counter-proposition is quite incompatible with the admission of Proposition I. Those who have conceded our starting-point cannot stand by the deliverance of ordinary thinking in regard to the object of knowledge, but must embrace the doctrine laid down in Proposition II.

7. The second counter-proposition is not only the expression of the ordinary notion of mankind in