Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 1 - Institutes of Metaphysic (1875 ed.).djvu/303

RhPROP. X.———— effects on the growth of philosophy, must be noticed somewhat more particularly. First, The true and original problem was, How does the unintelligible, the nonsensical, or, in the language of the old schools, "the sensible," become the intelligible? In other words, how is knowing effected?—what is knowable and known? That, more than two thousand years ago, was the leading question of philosophy (in so far as philosophy was epistemological, and not ontological), as it still is of these Institutes. But owing to some indistinctness in the original enunciation, this problem has been converted into the very futile inquiry, How does the intelligible become the intelligible? how does that which is knowable and known, become that which is knowable and known? how does something become what it already is? This is the problem of philosophy as now entertained by the cultivators of psychology, in so far as psychology ventures into the region of the higher metaphysics. The material universe is assumed to be that which is already intelligible, and non-contradictory in itself; and no sooner is it confronted with a precipient mind than a cognisance of it takes place. That statement is held nowadays to be sound philosophy—to be information which a man is not only entitled to communicate, but to be paid for communicating!

20. The second misconception is of a piece with