Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 1 - Institutes of Metaphysic (1875 ed.).djvu/274

246PROP. IX.———— can never apprehend himself in a purely indeterminate condition, he affirms that a man can never apprehend himself at all. This is certainly carrying the doctrine of determinate states, mental modifications, or particular cognitions, to an extreme. Many philosophers, however, to whom the speculations of Hume were as wormwood, have taught the same doctrine, only in terms somewhat more dubious and inexplicit.

6. All that this proposition contends for is, that intelligence can be cognisant of itself only when it knows itself in some determinate state, whatever that state may be, or by whatever means it may be brought about. This doctrine is a necessary truth of reason. To suppose that any intelligence can know itself in no particular state, is contradictory; for this would be equivalent to supposing that it could know itself in no state at all, which again would be equivalent to the supposition that it could know itself without knowing itself.

7. When it is said, however, that the ego can know itself only in or along with some particular modification, this position must be carefully distinguished from the assertion that it can know itself as that particular modification. This assertion would be quite as contradictory as the other—