Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 1 - Institutes of Metaphysic (1875 ed.).djvu/245

RhPROP. VII.———— Material things are continually dying, and coming alive again, in knowing, if not in being. It is quite possible that the existence of these things may catch the infection of fluctuation (if we may so speak) from the fluctuation which is notoriously inherent in the knowledge of them, and that the old philosophers meant to affirm that they had caught this infection, and that they were vanishing existences, as well as vanishing cognitions; but if so, that was not their fault—nor is it ours.

20. But the only point which calls for consideration and settlement in the first section of our science is, whether material things are known, and can be known, only as fluctuating and contingent. Whether they are so, is no question for the epistemology. In what has been already said, enough perhaps has been advanced to show that they are wholly of this character. The following reiteration may be added.

21. Material things come into, and go out of, our knowledge. Not one of them has the privilege of holding perpetual possession of the mind: a man need not at all times be cognisant even of his own body; and even although it were true that he always was cognisant of this, or of some other material thing, still, inasmuch as reason does not declare that all cognition is impossible unless some material thing be apprehended, none of them are