Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 1 - Institutes of Metaphysic (1875 ed.).djvu/384

356PROP. XVII.———— for themselves the possession of some purely intellectual intuition by which pure substance is gazed upon. Professing in this way to reach the truth by relinquishing the employment of their senses, they have advanced a doctrine which is sufficient to drive the student of philosophy out of his. He finds himself referred away from his senses and the sensible world to grope for Platonic substance in regions emptier than an exhausted receiver, and murkier than the darkness of Erebus. He finds himself gazing at abstractions without any eyes, and grasping nonentities without any hands; lifting up nothing upon the point of no fork; and filling with vacuity a faculty which he does not possess. This is what the student finds himself doing who studies Plato in any, or in all, of his expositors; and for this occupation, which is by no means a pleasurable one, he is indebted to their having mistaken for finished cognitions, data which were originally laid down as elements of cognition necessarily incognisable when considered apart from each other.

24. A hereditary dogma current in all the histories of philosophy is, that the ancient speculators were in the habit of treating the senses with disdain, and of asserting that they were in no way instrumental in placing the truth before the mind. "Magni est ingenii revocare mentem a sensibus," says Cicero, coolly platonising in the shade. Very