Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 1 - Institutes of Metaphysic (1875 ed.).djvu/337

RhPROP. XII.———— of our psychologists, in their attempts to ascertain the laws of thinking and knowing, by merely looking to these, considered as mental operations. Our Scottish philosophy, in particular, has presented a spectacle of this description. Reid obtained no result, owing to the abstract nature of his inquiry, and the nothingness of his system has escaped through the sieves of all his successors. They drag for abstractions in nets composed of abstractions; and, consequently, they catch very few fish. If we would avoid this termination to our toils; if we would protect ourselves against the unpleasantness of losing no result twice over, we must go to work in a very different way. It is of no use inquiring into the laws of knowing and thinking, considered as abstract operations. We must study the contents, and not the mere form of knowledge; for the form without the contents,—the law without that which the law determines,—is elusory as the dream of a shadow. We must ask, and find out, what we know, and what we think;—in other words, we must inquire whether matter per se be what we know or think, or whether we have not, all along, been practising an imposition upon ourselves in imagining that this was what we knew, when, in truth, this was not what we knew. If any important conclusions are to be reached, the concrete, and not the abstract, must be the object of our investigation, and this is what these Institutes have endeavoured to keep constantly in view.