Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 1 - Institutes of Metaphysic (1875 ed.).djvu/320

292PROP. XI.———— Meanwhile all that is necessary to bear in mind is the distinction between knowing and thinking, cognition and conception, presentation and representation, which is laid down in the following paragraph.

2. The term knowledge might be used, and sometimes is used, in this work, in a general way, to signify both any given presentation or cognition at the time when it is actually experienced, and the subsequent thought or representation or remembrance of such experienced presentation. But at present the distinction to be signalised is this: The word knowledge or knowing is employed to express our original experiences—the perceptions, for example, which we have of things when they are actually before us; and the word thought, or thinking, is employed to express our subsequent experience—that is, our representation or cogitation of that previous knowledge. To know, then, is to experience a perception or presentation of any kind in the first instance, or at first hand; to think is to revive such perception at a subsequent period, or to have it at second hand.

3. This proposition, and not the scholastic brocard which forms the tenth counter-proposition, is the foundation of a true philosophy of experiences. The scholastic dogma is false and contradictory. It