Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 1 - Institutes of Metaphysic (1875 ed.).djvu/372

344PROP. XVII.———— known or thought of along with them (Props. I. and XII.) Therefore the synthesis of phenomena and psychological substance is the mere phenomenal. With this proviso, then, that the psychological hypothesis does not answer its purpose, and that, while professing to give us some conception, however inadequate, of the substantial, it places before us the mere phenomenal, strict speculation can have no objection to concede to psychology as many occult substrata of qualities as she may choose to demand. One or one thousand is a matter of absolute in-difference.

11. Lest it should be supposed that these Institutes are obnoxious to the same sentence of reprehension which has just been pronounced upon psychology, inasmuch as it may be said that they too represent substance as constituted by a synthesis of phenomena (object + subject), the following difference must be pointed out and carefully borne in mind. The charge against psychology is, that the substance for which she contends is no substance at all, but is the mere phenomenal, because it requires to be supplemented in thought by something more—namely, by the "me;" whereas the substantial, for which strict speculation contends, is undoubtedly a substance in cognition (whatever it may be in existence); because, although it may be an aggregate of mere phenomena, it can and does,