Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 1 - Institutes of Metaphysic (1875 ed.).djvu/317

RhPROP. X.———— media. This kind of compromise is not the compromise which nature has set on foot. This tampering with the truth is the initiatory step which, if once taken, is sure to land us in the perdition of an extreme. Because, if sense, uncompanioned by intellect, can furnish any knowledge, why can it not furnish all knowledge, to the mind? That smashing question supersedes intellect, and an extravagant sensualism is enthroned. Again, if intellect, unaided by the senses (that is, by certain modes of apprehension, either the same as, or different from, ours), can supply any knowledge to the mind, why need it look to the senses for any of the materials of cognition? An excessive intellectualism—a wild idealism—is the result; and a subjective phantasmagoria of shadows usurps the place of a real and richly—diversified creation. In point of fact, philosophy has, ere now, been hurried into these two extremes—a consequence entirely attributable to the circumstance that, losing sight of the natural compromise between sense and intellect, she has supposed that this compromise was effected within each of them; that is to say, that each of them was capable, in its own way, of cognition. The only safe opinion to hold is, that the two constitute one capacity of cognition, and can bring knowledge to the mind only when in joint operation.—(For further information, see Prop. XVII., and, in particular, Obs. 21 et seq.)