Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 1 - Institutes of Metaphysic (1875 ed.).djvu/306

278PROP. X.———— blunder of their own invention. Plato's intelligible world is our sensible world. We shall see by-and-by in the Ontology that this announcement may require a very slight modification, but one so slight that meanwhile it may be proclaimed, in the broadest terms, that Plato's intelligible or supersensible is our sensible world—just the material universe which we see and hear and handle: this, and nothing but this, is Plato's ideal and intelligible home. But then,—his sensible world must be moved a peg downwards. It must be thrust down into the regions of nonsense. It must be called, as we have properly called it, and as he certainly meant to call, and sometimes did call it, the nonsensical world, the world of pure infatuation, of downright contradiction, of unalloyed absurdity; and this the whole material universe is, when divorced from the element which makes it a knowable and cogitable thing. Take away from the understood the element which renders it understandibleunderstandable [sic], and nonsense must remain behind. Take away from the intelligible world—that is, from the system of things by which we are surrounded—the essential element which enables us, and all intelligence, to know and apprehend it, and it must lapse into utter and unutterable absurdity. It becomes—not nothing—remember that—not nothing, for nothing, just as much as thing, requires the presence of the element which we have supposed