Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 1 - Institutes of Metaphysic (1875 ed.).djvu/217

RhPROP. VI.———— the division, namely, of our cognitions into kinds, and not into elements. The dilemma to which it is reduced is this: it must either stand to that distinction, or it must desert it. If conceptualism stands to the distinction, and maintains that the general conceptions are distinct cognitions—are ideas cognisable by themselves, and independently of the particular cognitions—in that case the general conceptions evaporate in mere words; for it is certain that the mind cannot think of any genus without thinking of one or more of the particulars which rank under it. Thus nominalism is triumphant. Again, if conceptualism deserts the distinction, and admits that the general conceptions are not cognitions which can be entertained irrespective of the particular cognitions—in that case the general cognitions are reduced from cognitions to mere elements of cognition; for a thought which cannot stand in the mind by itself is not a thought, but only a factor of thought. And thus we have a most incongruous doctrine,—an analysis which divides our cognitions into a kind and into an element. For conceptualism still cleaves to the doctrine of particular cognitions as distinct from the general ones, although, when hard pressed, she seems willing to admit that the latter are not distinct from the former. Here the confusion becomes hopeless. This is as if we were, first, to divide human beings into men and women, and were then to affirm that the men only were human beings, and