Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 1 - Institutes of Metaphysic (1875 ed.).djvu/248

220PROP. VII.———— distinguished from the others, as they are reciprocally distinguished from each other—that is, it is distinguished from them, not by its universality, but by its particularity—not by the circumstance that it is the point of identity in all our cognitions, but by the circumstance that it is itself a special and completed cognition. The unity in our cognitions (that is, their reduction to a class) is effected, not by the observation that they are our cognitions, but simply by the observation that they are cognitions; in other words, they are formed into a genus, not from their containing and presenting the common and unchangeable element which we call self but from some other cause which the counter-proposition—finds it difficult, indeed impossible, even to name."

25. This counter-proposition expresses, more explicitly than has yet been done, the inadvertency of ordinary thinking in regard to the cognition or conception of oneself. Its substance may be readily understood from the following plain illustration: I have the cognition of a book—this is, in the estimation of my ordinary thinking, a particular and completed cognition. I have the cognition of a tree—that too, in the estimation of my ordinary thinking, is a particular and completed cognition, distinct altogether from the first. Again, I have the cognition of myself—this also, in the estimation of