Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 1 - Institutes of Metaphysic (1875 ed.).djvu/294

266PROP. X.———— opinion, the only way to reach clear and satisfactory results is to begin by giving a philosopher credit, in the first instance, for such tenets as the general scope of his observations appears most to countenance, and afterwards to balance the account by debiting him with such deductions as he may be liable to on the score of ambiguity or imperfect fulfilment of his intention; in fact, by first taking into view his aim as if he had accomplished it, and then by pointing out how far, in his confusion, he may have missed or fallen short of it. On no other principle than this can the behests of a critical history of philosophy be fulfilled, or her books kept free from embarrassment. Because merely to exhibit the efforts of speculative thinking in the crude and inexplicit forms in which they may have been originally propounded, affords no insight into their true import and tendency. No purpose of any kind is answered when the recorder of philosophical opinions states, as he is too often in the habit of doing, a confused and ambiguous doctrine in terms equally ambiguous and confused.

11. This being understood, it will be proper to proceed as we have begun, and to lay out the doctrines now under consideration in a distinct and explicit shape, and as if they had been expounded in that shape by the early Greek speculators—for that these doctrines were theirs by implication, and