Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 1 - Institutes of Metaphysic (1875 ed.).djvu/314

286PROP. X.———— can be effectually overthrown. The other distinction is a distinction without a difference—one which cannot be understood, and which leaves sensualism standing as before.

26. These remarks may be sufficient to establish the correctness of the statement made in Observation 4, that every attempt to qualify or restrict the counter-proposition short of its subversion by Proposition X., has only had the effect of adding confusion to error, (for what has been proved in regard to Kant, may very well be assumed in regard to other psychologists), and that the scholastic maxim, if accepted at all, ought to be accepted in all its latitude. They also bear out the charge advanced in Observation 7, that the anti-sensual psychology of Kant and others has left the contradiction involved in sensualism uncorrected. This contradiction consists not merely in the assertion that the data of sense are alone intelligible to the mind, but in the opinion that any of these data are at all intelligible to the mind before the mind has supplemented them with itself, and apprehended, not them, but the synthesis of them and itself. This opinion is nowhere distinctly overthrown by the philosophy of Kant; and therefore our conclusion is, that instead of his system having destroyed sensualism, the sensualism latent in his system has rather destroyed it.