Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 1 - Institutes of Metaphysic (1875 ed.).djvu/237

RhPROP. VII.———— point of view, regarded as differences. Thus the resemblance in the cognitions expressed by the word "animal" is a difference when set off against the resemblance in the cognitions expressed by the word "tree." But the resemblance in all our cognitions, which is properly signified by the word me, can never be converted into a difference. No class, or classes, of my cognitions are distinguished from another class, or classes, by the circumstance that they are mine. This is the very circumstance in which they are all not distinguished from each other—the very point in which the whole of them, whatever their character otherwise may be, are merged in identity. Hence "oneself," or the ego, is the summum genus of cognition—the ultimate generalisation beyond which epistemology cannot ascend. And a very different universal this is, from the ordinary abstract universal named ens, which is the logician's delight.

11. From these remarks it must not be concluded that the ego, considered as the summum genus of cognition, is a mere generalisation from experience. Were this the case, it would be destitute of that strict universality and necessity which reason claims for it, as the common element in every possible cognition of every possible intelligence. It is this by a necessary law of all cognition. But every necessary truth of reason, although not dependent