Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 1 - Institutes of Metaphysic (1875 ed.).djvu/271

RhPROP. IX.———— these two laws stand upon an equal footing, and consequently must there not be some mistake or confusion in the statement which declares that the one of them (that laid down in Proposition I.) is the more fundamental and essential of the two?

3. There is no mistake; and the apparent confusion is easily cleared up. The law laid down in Prop. I. as the primary condition of knowledge has an undoubted title to precedence—for this reason, that it names the one thing (to wit, self) which must be known in order to bring about a cognisance of any other thing; whereas the proposition which announces (as Prop. IX. does) that something else must be known in order to bring about a cognisance of self, cannot name what that something else is. This cannot be named in any proposition, because, as has been said, the varieties of the particular element are contingent, indefinite, and inexhaustible. And therefore, although the truth set forth in Prop. IX. is equally certain with that stated in Prop. I., the law of knowledge announced in the latter proposition is entitled to the pre-eminence which has been assigned to it. If a man must know himself, as the condition of his knowing any one, or any number, of ten million things, surely that law would take rank before the converse law, which might declare with equal truth that he must know some (indefinite) one, or more, of these ten