Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 1 - Institutes of Metaphysic (1875 ed.).djvu/204

176PROP. VI.———— impediment was that which has been already insisted on—the neglect to keep the theory of Knowing distinct from the theory of Being, and to work out the one completely before entering on the other. This omission threw the whole undertaking into disorder, and led to a total misconception of the character of the Platonic analysis. Plato's epistemology was unripe. He had merely succeeded in carrying our cognitions up into certain subordinate unities, certain inferior universals, called by him ideas, and which afterward; under the name of genera and species, afforded such infinite torment to the school-men, until they were disposed of, and laid at rest for a time, by the short-sighted exorcisms of psychology. But there he stuck. He failed to carry them up into their highest unity. He missed the real and crowning universal, and lost himself among fictitious ones. The summum genus of cognition, which is no abstraction but a living reality, has no place in his system. He has nowhere announced what it is. Hence his theory of knowledge was left incomplete, and being incomplete it was unintelligible; for in philosophy the completed alone is the comprehensible. His theory of existence was still more bewildering: it was burthened with its own difficulties and defects, besides those entailed upon it by an epistemology which was very considerably in rear. This, the ontological aspect of the Platonic doctrine, was the side which was chiefly looked