Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 1 - Institutes of Metaphysic (1875 ed.).djvu/233

RhPROP. VII.———— Hence we almost entirely overlook it; we attend to it but little. That neglect is inevitable. Its perpetual presence is almost equivalent to its perpetual absence. And thus the ego, from the very circumstance of its being never absent from our cognitions, comes to be almost regarded as that which is never present in them at all. Our intimacy with self being the maximum of intimacy, our attention to self conformably to the law of familiarity, is naturally the minimum of attention. It is thus that we would explain how it has happened that, although the article which philosophers were in quest of was one which, by the very terms of their search, was necessarily and continually known to them—inasmuch as what they wanted to lay hold of was the common and ever-present and never-changing element in all their knowledge—it should still have evaded their pursuit. The foregoing considerations may perhaps be sufficient to account for this memorable oversight, and to explain how the ego, from our very familiarity with it, should have escaped notice, as the permanent, necessary, and universal constituent of cognition; and how, consequently, the proposition which declares that such is its character should have failed, hitherto, to obtain in philosophy the place and the recognition which it deserves.

8. This also may be added, that the importance of a principle is never perceived, nor the necessity of