Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 1 - Institutes of Metaphysic (1875 ed.).djvu/167

RhPROP. IV.———— first triumph of philosophy is achieved. This operation turns the flank of every hostile scheme, and breaks down the most formidable impediment with which speculation has to struggle. Her course is now comparatively smooth. One advantage of this reduction is that it brings before us, in a new light (and the more lights it can be viewed in the better), the leading question of the epistemology. That problem is, What is the essential condition and constituent of all knowledge; or what is that which enters, and must enter, into the composition of every object of knowledge? But another form of the question might be, What is every object of knowledge without this essential constituent? And the answer is, that it must be the contradictory; because it is obvious that if the objects of knowledge be deprived of the necessary element which makes them objects of knowledge, the remaining part must be universally unknowable and inconceivable—in other word; contradictory. But the next question is, What is this incogitable remainder, this contradictory caput mortuum? For it is idle to talk of this contradictory element unless we are able to say what it is; and the answer is, that it is matter per se, or, carried to a higher generality, objects without any subject. This is the contradictory element in all knowledge—the contradiction which intellect has to overcome—the wastes and wilds of absurdity which are given over to the reclaiming processes of