Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 1 - Institutes of Metaphysic (1875 ed.).djvu/276

248PROP. IX.———— psychology is that the mind is cognisant only of the variable determinations of which it is the subject; and that it is cognisant of itself as these.

8. Ninth Counter-proposition.—"The ego per se is not absolutely, and necessarily, and universally unknowable. We, indeed, are unable, on account of the imperfection of our faculties, to know ourselves in a purely indeterminate state. We are ignorant of the essence of the mind; but other intelligences may not be subject to this restriction, but may be able to know themselves per se."

9. The opinion expressed in this counter-proposition, if not an express article of ordinary thinking, has at any rate been formally adopted and largely insisted on by psychology. But here, again, as in the case of matter per se, psychology is in error in attributing our inability to know ourselves per se to a wrong cause. The psychological blunder is twofold. First, it overlooks a sovereign law binding upon all reason—viz., that no intelligence can apprehend itself in a state of pure indetermination; and, secondly, it refers our inability to perform this feat, not to that supreme and necessary law, but to some special limitation in our faculties of cognition. These may be imperfect enough. But the disability in question (if that be a disability which is one of the prime characteristics of intelligence considered