Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 1 - Institutes of Metaphysic (1875 ed.).djvu/277

RhPROP. IX.———— simply as intelligence) is certainly not due to the cause to which psychology refers it. It is due to the law to which expression was given in Proposition VI., namely, that the universal ground or common constituent of all knowledge cannot be apprehended by itself, but only in synthesis with some particular. That law is a necessary truth of reason; and the law expressed in the present proposition is merely one of its inevitable corollaries.

10. At this place it is proper to take some notice of those random skirmishes or stray shots—they can scarcely be called controversies or discussions—which occasionally show themselves in the history of speculation touching what is called the "essence" of the mind. And, first of all, it is important to remark the change of meaning which this word has undergone in its transmission from the ancient to the modern schools of philosophy. Formerly the word "essence" () meant that part or characteristic of anything which threw an intellectual illumination over all the rest of it. It was the point of light, the main peculiarity observable in whatever was presented to the mind. It signified the quality or feature of a thing which made it what it was, and enabled the thing or things in question to be distinguished from all other things. It was a synonym for the superlatively comprehensible, the superlatively cogitable. Nowadays it