Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 1 - Institutes of Metaphysic (1875 ed.).djvu/189

RhPROP. VI.———— feature present in every cognition?—(see Introduction, § 85, also foot-note p. 73,)—this question, of course, implies that there is such an element or feature, and also that our cognitions contain other constituents of a variable and particular character. But a formal enunciation and proof of the proposition have been brought forward, because, while it presents the only correct analysis of knowledge, and the only tenable doctrine on the subject of "the particular and the universal," it affords an opening for a few remarks on the history of that much-debated but still undecided topic. This proposition is the thesis of that controversy—the institute which settles it. The main purpose, however, which this proposition serves is, that it supplies the only premiss from which it is competent to prove that the mind cannot be known to be material —a point essential to ulterior proceedings, and which must be made good in order to support the concluding truth of the ontology.

4. Like every other question in philosophy, the discussion respecting "particulars and universals" was begun at the wrong end. This topic was made a question of Being before it had undergone probationary scrutiny and received settlement as a question of Knowing. The Greek philosophers, at a