Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 1 - Institutes of Metaphysic (1875 ed.).djvu/336

308PROP. XII.————, and one which, at the outset, ought not to be attended to at all. The inquiry should be gone into as if it were merely the smelting process, by which the most secret and essential laws of cognition and of thought are to be extricated from the dross of ordinary opinion, and submitted to the attention of mankind. Viewed in this light, the importance of the discussion cannot be too highly estimated. The agitation of no other question can make known to us the fundamental laws of all knowledge—the binding necessities of all reason. If any other topic will answer this purpose, let it be announced: philosophers will very readily proceed to its examination. Would people inquire directly into the laws of thought and of knowledge, by merely looking to knowledge or to thought itself, without attending to what is known, or to what is thought of? Psychology usually goes to work in this abstract fashion; but such a mode of procedure is hopeless,—as hopeless as the analogous instance by which the wits of old were wont to typify any particularly fruitless undertaking,—namely, the operation of milking a he-goat into a sieve. No milk comes in the first instance, and even that the sieve will not retain! There is a loss of nothing twice over. Like the man milking, the inquirer obtains no milk in the first place; and, in the second place, he loses it, like the man holding the sieve. Modern wit has not equalled that intolerable jest, which describes exactly the predicament