Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 1 - Institutes of Metaphysic (1875 ed.).djvu/295

RhPROP. X.———— that their aim was such as has been described, however unsteady their procedure may have been, is certain. What abatements may be required will be seen when we come to show forth their ambiguities, and the consequences of these ambiguities on the subsequent progress of speculation. To resume, then, the thread of the discussion.

12. From what has been already said, it is obvious that the distinction drawn by the old philosophers between sense and intellect was as extreme as it is possible to conceive. Not that they regarded sense and intellect as two distinct and separate faculties; their distinction was more complete and thorough-going than that. They rather regarded them as two distinct and opposite poles or factors of one and the same faculty, or rather of one and the same mind. Sense was the factor which seized and brought before the mind the unintelligible and nonsensical data which intellect had to transmute into the knowable and known. In that state these data were absolutely incomprehensible by the mind. They were as yet no objects of cognition. They became objects of cognition only after the intellect, wakening into action, transferred over upon them some element of its own, which gave completion to their inchoation. By means of this additional element an object of cognition was formed; and the mind was able to