Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 1 - Institutes of Metaphysic (1875 ed.).djvu/374

346PROP. XVII.———— to substance and phenomenon. But psychology holds that this synthesis is the mere phenomenal, and that its constituents—object on the one hand, and subject on the other—are the substantial, in existence. But, inasmuch as psychology can scarcely be supposed to maintain that something of which we have no sort of conception, either adequate or inadequate, is the existing substantial, psychology must be held to teach that we have some vague and glimmering kind of notion of these in their separation, as the substantial in cognition, as well as in existence. And thus, as has been said, the distinction has been directly reversed. Psychology declares that to be the phenomenal which speculation declares to be the substantial, and conversely. No transposition can be more exact, in spite of the psychological asseveration that the substantial lies altogether beyond the limits of knowledge and of thought. That must be taken as a mere façon de parler. There cannot be a doubt that the psychologist regards solidity as convertible with substance,—as we all do in our ordinary or unspeculative moments.

13. Irrespective of the inconvenience caused by the reversal of the terms of an important philosophical distinction, this psychological doctrine, as has been already sufficiently shown, is erroneous and contradictory. Objects, whatever they may be,