Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 1 - Institutes of Metaphysic (1875 ed.).djvu/313

RhPROP. X.———— (and the evidence that he did intend to say it is very insufficient), he has certainly not said that the sensible intuitions, the space in which they are contained, together with all the mental categories that may be applied to them, are, one and all of them, absolutely contradictory and absurd, unless the me is known along with them. But unless Kant maintained that position, he effected no subversion of sensualism. Unless he held that sense, considered simply as such, is a faculty of nonsense, and that the sensible data, considered simply as such, are contradictory, he did nothing to uphold the essential distinction between sense and intellect. This, however, he does not appear to have held. He regarded the distinction, not as a difference of nature, but as a mere difference of degree. But this is to obliterate the distinction. A small man is as much a man as a big man; and a small or inferior cognitive power (sense, according to Kant) is as much a cognitive power as a great or superior cognitive power (intellect, according to Kant). The only true opposition is between intellect and non-intellect. Intellect is intelligent, and its objects are intelligible. Sense is non-intelligent, and its objects are nonsensical. All knowledge is intellectual knowledge—mere sensible knowledge is a contradiction. This is the only distinction between sense and intellect which is a distinction, or which can be understood. It is the only ground on which