Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 1 - Institutes of Metaphysic (1875 ed.).djvu/319

RhPROP. XI.————

1. In this proposition a distinction is laid down between knowing and thinking—between cognition and conception. This distinction is necessary in order to unearth the verdicts of common opinion and of psychological science from the burrows into which they may run, when dislodged from their usual positions by the cannonade of the preceding propositions. When the articles specified in these propositions, and particularly in IV., V., and IX., are proved to be altogether unknowable, common opinion and psychological science may perhaps concede this, and yet may entertain the supposition that they are not absolutely unthinkable. Hence, lest it should be supposed that thought is competent to represent what cognition is incompetent to present, and that the absolute unknowables have thus another chance of being, in some way or other, the objects of the mind, it has been deemed necessary to introduce this and the following proposition for the purpose of destroying that opinion, and of pursuing the unknowables, not into their ultimate place of refuge (for, as we shall find in the agnoiology, they have still another hiding-quarter into which they must be followed and slaughtered by the sword of necessary truth), but into their penultimate citadel of shelter. This dialectical operation will unfold itself in the next proposition.