Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 1 - Institutes of Metaphysic (1875 ed.).djvu/266

238PROP. VIII.———— material thing, or a particular development from material conditions. The error of the immaterialist consists in the supposition that the mind or self is a particular immaterial thing. Such statements are mere hypotheses—indeed, mere words, to which no conception is attached. The doom of both is settled by the remark, that the ego cannot be known as a particular thing at all, but only as the One Known in All Known.

14. In conclusion, it is humbly submitted that this eighth proposition, and its demonstration, constitute the only proof by which the true immateriality of the mind can be rationally established. The necessity of Propositions VII. and VI., as supplying the only premises for such a conclusion, must also, it is conceived, be now apparent. These three propositions are the institutes to which every controversy about the materiality or immateriality of the mind must be referred for settlement. A conception of the mind as immaterial can only be attained by, first of all, conceiving it as that which is the universal part, as contradistinguished from all that is the particular part, of every cognition. Hence the necessity of Proposition VII., which fixes the ego as the universal part of all, and matter, in its various forms, as the particular part of some, cognitions. But to establish Proposition VII. it was necessary to show that there is a universal and a