Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 1 - Institutes of Metaphysic (1875 ed.).djvu/244

216PROP. VII.———— that it was intelligently accepted in neither. They ran, as has been said, their epistemology into the same mould with their ontology. Their doctrine of Knowing was absorbed in their doctrine of Being; and their expositors have not been at pains to separate the components of that original fusion. Looking more to the ontological than to the epistemological aspects of the ancient systems, they have failed to do justice to the opinions which they contain. The case in hand is a striking exemplification of this. By expounding this speculation touching the perpetual flux of all material things as an ontological dogma, and by leaving it unexplained as an epistemological truth, the commentators on philosophy have done much injury both to the science itself, and to those who were its original cultivators.

19. They ought to have attended more to the epistemological side of this opinion, and then they would have perceived its merit and its truth. They ought to have understood that when the old philosophers spoke of the incessant generation and corruption to which all material things are subject, what they meant to say was, that these things are, at times, the objects of our cognition, and that, at times, they are not so. If this was not the whole, it was at any rate a very important part, of what the early speculators intended to affirm when they pronounced the entire material universe to be of a fluxional character, and in a constantly perishing condition.