Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 1 - Institutes of Metaphysic (1875 ed.).djvu/141

RhPROP. III.———— soon as Y apprehends Y + X the whole business of knowing is accomplished. The unit of knowledge, the minimum scibile per se, is constituted and compassed. We may add to this X as many other X's as we please. But that makes no difference in the eyes of reason. A million X's plus Y is only accidentally but not essentially more than the minimum scibile per se. Although in the ordinary intercourse of life it may be convenient to regard the minimum and the maximum of cognition as diverse, yet, speculatively considered, they are coincident.

9. Third counter proposition.—"The objective and the subjective parts of knowledge are separable in cognition. The ego and that which is presented to it as not itself, or as the non-ego, are each of them a unit of cognition. Object and subject, oneself and the thing with which one is engaged, are not one unit or minimum, but are two units or minima of knowledge. In other words, either of them can be known without the other being known."

10. That this counter-proposition embodies the inadvertency of popular thinking with regard to the constitution of knowledge is undoubted. Every man in his ordinary moments conceives that he can and does separate in cognition the thing which he knows from himself the knower of it. He looks upon it as something which he can and does apprehend