Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 1 - Institutes of Metaphysic (1875 ed.).djvu/136

108PROP. III.———— that self or the subject is an integral and essential part of every object of cognition. But the reader is requested to bear in mind that this does not mean that he is a part of that part of the objects of his cognition, which he calls chairs, and tables, and trees. It means quite the contrary. It means that he is not, and cannot be, a part of that part. The table before you, good reader, is only a part of the object of your cognition. You yourself are the other part. The true and total object of your mind is the table, or whatever else it may be,—and yourself. The latter part, therefore, cannot by any possibility be a part of the former part; for to suppose that it can, would be equivalent to holding that a thing, instead of being what it was, was something which it was not. The two factors of cognition—the two constituents of every known object (to wit, the ego and the non-ego), are for ever contradistinguished—for ever sundered by a fatal law which holds them everlastingly apart, and prevents either of them from being its opposite. But it is precisely this inexorable severance which also keeps them together as inseparably united in cognition.

4. Inseparability in cognition does not mean inseparability in space. The necessary laws of knowledge admit of our apprehending things as separable, and as separate, in space from ourselves to any extent we please; but they do not admit of our