Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 1 - Institutes of Metaphysic (1875 ed.).djvu/291

RhPROP. X.———— two necessary truths of reason, and accordingly subverts.

7. Psychology has frequently challenged the validity of this counter-proposition; but her efforts having been directed merely to its limitation, the contradiction which it involves has remained uncorrected; for, as has been said, the counter-proposition is equally contradictory, whether it be taken in all its latitude, or under some restriction. The psychologists have merely rejected it in its broader acceptation. They deny that the whole of our knowledge is derived from the senses, but they concede that some of it is referable to that single source. The psychological limitation is this: It is not true, says the psychologist, that all our cognitions come to us through the senses; but it is certainly true that some of them are due solely to that source—not meaning that the data furnished by the senses are mere elements of cognition, but that they are actual cognitions themselves. The anti-sensualist movement which, for a considerable time past, has shown itself in the philosophy of this country, of France, and of Germany, has certainly not got beyond this qualified repudiation of the scholastic dogma on which sensualism if founded. This qualified repudiation, which is equivalent to a modified acceptance, leaves the contradiction precisely where it was.