Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 1 - Institutes of Metaphysic (1875 ed.).djvu/308

280PROP. X.———— sensible world is the world with the element of all intelligibility taken out; but that must be appropriately termed the nonsensical or unintelligible world; and just as little can there be any doubt that his intelligible world is the world with the element of all intelligibility put in; but this is what we, nowadays, usually call the sensible world. So that, to preserve the relation between the two terms, in the sense in which Plato understood them—indeed, to understand the relation in the only acceptation in which it can be understood—we must bear in mind that the contrast which, in his phraseology, was indicated by the words sensible and intelligible, must be signalised, in modern speech, by the terms nonsensical and sensible, for the latter word is used nowadays very generally, instead of the word "intelligible." These remarks supply a key, and the only key, to the entire philosophy of ancient Greece. This key, however, seems to have been mislaid until now. If this is denied, the denier must be prepared to point out some place in any book, ancient or modern, in which one intelligible word is uttered about Plato's intelligible world. When that is done, this presumptive claim shall be relinquished, and the key given up to its proper owner.

23. We have now got to the root of the sensualist maxim which constitutes Counter-proposition X.