Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 1 - Institutes of Metaphysic (1875 ed.).djvu/222

194PROP. VI.———— human mind, as it is called, has done incalculable mischief to the cause of speculative truth. The doctrine of abstraction, in particular, one of its favourite themes, has been the parent of more aberrations than can be told. Our psychologists may guard and explain themselves as they please, but their attribution to man of a faculty called abstraction has been, from first to last, the most disconcerting and misleading hypothesis which either they or their readers could have entertained. We are supposed to have a power of forming abstract conceptions; but it is obvious from the foregoing observations that we have no such power, and that no abstract idea, either particular or general, can be attained by any intelligence. Such conceptions can only be approximated. When the mind attends more to the particular than to the universal element, or, conversely, more to the universal than to the particular element of any cognition, the abstract particular—that is, a thing by itself or the abstract universal—that is, the genus by itself, is approached, but neither of them is ever reached. To reach either of them is impracticable, for this would require the entire suppression of one or other of the factors of all cognition, and such a suppression would not be equivalent to the attainment of the abstract, but to the extinction of knowledge and intelligence. Had our psychologists informed us that the main endowment of reason is a faculty which prevents abstractions from being formed, there would have been much truth in the remark; for intelligence