Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 1 - Institutes of Metaphysic (1875 ed.).djvu/255

RhPROP. VIII.———— ego: the exhibition (supposing it to be possible) would instantly prove that the self so shown was not himself; because the man would say,—I know myself along with that material thing; which words would prove that he was cognisant of something over and above the mere material thing, and would prove, moreover, that this additional element (himself) was known by him as the universal constituent of that, and of all his cognitions; while the element before him, the pineal gland, or whatever else it might be, was known by him as the particular constituent merely of that cognition: so that to suppose him to know it to be himself would be to suppose him to know that one part of his cognition was another part of his cognition—in other words, that the universal part was the particular part, which, of course, is absurd, and a violation of the first law of reason, which declares that we must know a thing to be what we know it to be.

3. It is at this point that the controversies respecting the materiality and the immateriality of the thinking principle take off from the main trunk of the speculative tree. The eighth counter-proposition, embodying the inadvertent result of ordinary thinking, and embodying also the doctrine of our popular psychologies, whether these psychologies favour, as some of them do, the materiality, or, as others of them do, the immateriality of the mind, is