Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 1 - Institutes of Metaphysic (1875 ed.).djvu/197

RhPROP. VI.———— solution of the problem requires, as its very condition, that the two questions, which he ran into one, should be kept perfectly distinct. Hence his ultimate conclusion, however true, is groundless. Hence, too, the perplexed character of his whole train of speculation. His doctrine of Knowing is so closely intertwisted with his doctrine of Being, that it may be doubted whether his own eye could trace the strands of the discussion, or whether the filaments themselves were separate. His expositors, at any rate, have never been able to give any intelligible account of either theory, whether viewed separately, or viewed in their amalgamation.

12. Nevertheless, if Plato was confused and unsystematic in execution, he was large in design, and magnificent in surmises. His pliant genius sits close to universal reality, like the sea which fits in to all the sinuosities of the land. Not a shore of thought was left untouched by his murmuring lip. Over deep and over shallow he rolls on, broad, urbane, and unconcerned. To this day, all philosophic truth is Plato rightly divined; all philosophic error is Plato misunderstood. Out of this question respecting the particular and the universal, as moved by him, came the whole philosophy of the Alexandrian absolutists, the whole contentions of the medieval schoolmen. Around it all modern speculation gravitates. Even psychology has laid her small finger