Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 1 - Institutes of Metaphysic (1875 ed.).djvu/162

134PROP. IV.———— per se may be known by other intelligences, though perhaps not known by us. Psychology professes to deal not with necessary, but only with contingent, truth—and the mischievous error now under consideration (for error it is, inasmuch as it attributes our incompetency to a wrong cause,—and how mischievous it is will afterwards appear in the agnoiology) is the offspring of that timidity. These Institutes deal only with necessary truth; and one of the advantages of this restriction is, that while it saves us from the mistake alluded to, it enables us to prove, as an easy and legitimate deduction from their first principle, that all cognisance of the material universe per se is not only impossible to us, but that it is universally impossible. This conclusion, which here is only in the bud, shows blossom in the agnoiology, and bears fruit in the ontology.

16. By these considerations matter per se is reduced to the predicament of a contradiction: it is not the simply inconceivable by us, but the absolutely inconceivable in itself. This reduction, the importance of which will be apparent by-and-by, could not have been effected upon any principle of psychological strategy. It is a manœuvre competent only to the dialectic of necessary truth. "Matter per se," says psychology, "may not be known by us, but what of that? If it can be possibly known by any intelligence, it is not to be laid down as the