Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 1 - Institutes of Metaphysic (1875 ed.).djvu/288

260PROP. X.———— must know itself along with all that it apprehends by the aid of the senses, and had he proved that intellect could not know itself as material, his amendment would have been all that could be required to constitute a true proposition. Perhaps this was his meaning; but if so, it finds no adequate expression in his words, for these merely declare that nothing is in the intellect (except itself) which was not taken in through the senses—a position which does not prove that the intellect cannot know itself to be material, and which does not even affirm that all mere objects of sense are incognisable by intelligence. If the intellect merely is in itself, without being at all times known to itself, mere sensible or material objects—that is, objects known without any subject being known along with them—may very well be apprehended. The Leibnitzian restriction goes for nothing.

4. The counter-proposition, in its original language, is not altogether unambiguous. The version of it given above is purposely extreme, in order that it may stand forth freed from all equivocation. That the words will bear this interpretation is Undoubted. It will be apparent, also, before we have done, that in no other sense will they yield anything like a consistent, or even an intelligible, doctrine; and that every attempt to qualify them (short of the