Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 1 - Institutes of Metaphysic (1875 ed.).djvu/322

294PROP. XI.———— experience has furnished no exact type or pattern. Moreover, when knowledge has supplied thought with a single type or model of any kind, it can conceive other cases of that type or model, though these should never fall under its direct knowledge or observation. It can conceive the type of which one example has been submitted to it, repeated ad infinitum, and with certain variations. And, further, supposing intelligences different from ours to exist, we can conceive them both to know and to think much which is inconceivable to us. But still in all its dealings with knowledge—in all its cuttings and carvings upon the data of experience—our thought, and all thought, is subject to the two following restrictions, which cannot be, in the slightest degree, transgressed.

5. The first restriction to which all thought or representation is subject is this: Thought cannot transcend knowledge so as to invent any entire and absolute novelty. It cannot add to the data of experience anything of which knowledge or experience cannot possibly furnish any sort of type, either direct or remote. Thought cannot create any element beyond what might possibly be given in knowledge or experience. The second restriction is this: Thought cannot so transgress knowledge as entirely to leave out or abolish, any element which is essential to the constitution of original