Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 1 - Institutes of Metaphysic (1875 ed.).djvu/193

RhPROP. VI.———— contingent, and so forth. The childish generalisations of the school of Thales are quite as satisfactory as these unreasoned and unmeaning repetitions.

8. When it is said that these philosophers speculated concerning the nature of Being, and not concerning the nature of Knowing, this does not mean that they entered on the former research under the influence of any clear and deliberate preference, or adhered to it exclusively. The distinction, at that time, had not been definitely made; even to this hour it has never been dearly laid down, or kept constantly in view. It is not, therefore, to be supposed that these philosophers expressly excluded the laws and constitution of knowledge from their consideration. An inorganic epistemology, like a primitive stratum, crops out, at intervals, through the crust of their ontological lucubrations; and their conjectures about existence are interspersed with notices about cognition. There is, indeed, a constant tendency in their speculations to work the question round from the one of these topics into the other, and to ask not only, how do things exist; how and what are they; what renders them existent? but also to raise the very different question, how are things known; how and what do we think about them; what renders them intelligible? The crude cosmogonies which have the former investigation in view, break asunder ever and anon, and afford glimpses of intellectual systems which aim at