Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 1 - Institutes of Metaphysic (1875 ed.).djvu/292

264PROP. X.———— 8. The root of the mischief is to be found in the obliteration, in modern times, of the cardinal distinction between Sense and Intellect which was taken at a very early period by the Greek philosophers, and which it is most essential to the progress of all definite and well-regulated speculation to restore, and to uphold in its original stringency. This distinction is perhaps the most important that was ever drawn in philosophy. And, therefore, the history of the various fortunes which it has undergone, and of the controversies and perplexities which have arisen from confounding it, cannot be out of place in a work which professes to furnish the text of all metaphysical annotation. This, too, is the proposition under which the discussion referred to appropriately falls.

9. It has been stated elsewhere (Prop. IV., Obs. 20), that the aim of the early Greek metaphysic, in so far as it was of an epistemological character, was the explanation of the conversion of the unintelligible into the intelligible—of the process through which the unknowable passed into the knowable—of the change which the not-to-be-understood had to undergo in becoming the to-be-understood. Hence it, of course, fixes its starting-point in the absolutely unknowable and unintelligible; that is, in the contradictory, or, as we should nowadays say, in plainer language, in the utterly nonsensical. To