Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 1 - Institutes of Metaphysic (1875 ed.).djvu/325

RhPROP. XI.———— remove all dubiety upon this point, in order to obviate any misunderstanding as to what this system really accomplishes, as well as to correct one of the vaguest inadvertencies of ordinary opinion, and to strip away from psychology one of the last coverings with which she endeavours to conceal her weakness and deformity. The minimum cogitabile per se is neither more nor less essentially than the minimum scibile per se; but the two are of the same dimensions and composition.

9. These remarks might be followed up by some notices of the history of representationism, or, as Dr Reid terms it, the ideal theory of perception, and by some account of the controversy in regard to it in which our countryman is supposed to have particularly distinguished himself. It is, however, unnecessary to say more than this, that the whole polemic had its origin in a blunder on the part of Dr Reid, who supposed that his adversaries understood by the term "representative knowledge," something different from what he understood by the term "intuitive knowledge." Both parties meant exactly the same thing, only they called it by a different name. The representationists held that real objects stand face to face with the mind quite as decidedly as Dr Reid did, or as any sane man could do—that is to say, they held that it was our perceptions of these things which were immediately