Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 1 - Institutes of Metaphysic (1875 ed.).djvu/370

342PROP. XVII.———— are not known substances—they are not the substantial in cognition, whatever they may be in existence; and consequently natural thinking, which declares that they are this, is convicted of entertaining a contradictory inadvertency. Thus the question, as to what is and what is not the substantial in thought is brought to a short but very decisive issue. The synthesis so often referred to, and which henceforward, for the sake of brevity, shall be generally denominated object-plus-subject, is the substantial, and the only substantial, in knowledge and in thought.

8. The psychological opinion as to existing substance is, that this is the occult substratum of qualities Such an opinion is quite harmless, if taken along with the two following explanations: first, that the substance for which it contends does not answer its purpose; and, secondly, that this substance is merely the phenomenal. A word must be said on each of these points, in order to expose the hollowness of the psychological doctrine, for its plausibility causes it to be a trap to unwary or inexact thinkers.

9. First, This opinion does not answer its purpose. Qualities, says psychology, must have a support, phenomena must have something to inhere in; they cannot be conceived as subsisting by