Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 1 - Institutes of Metaphysic (1875 ed.).djvu/388

360PROP. XVII.———— Further than this, to attempt to prosecute our researches in metaphysics by turning away from the senses, or to expect to reach the truth by disdaining them and their intimations, would be to embark on a very hopeless enterprise; and, moreover, to suppose that the ancient philosophers bad any other meaning in view than that now stated, when they inculcated this precept, would be to treat them with very great injustice.

27. From these remarks, it must now be obvious to the reader (and this is the point which these observations are chiefly designed to bring out) that ancient philosophy and modern psychology stand diametrically opposed to each other in their views as to substance and phenomenon. According to the old systems, the synthesis of subject-plus-object (or, as they expressed it, the synthesis of the universal and the particular) is known substance, and this substance or synthesis is made up of two phenomena—two factors which are phenomenal, inasmuch as neither can be known without the other, and which are nevertheless substantial, because the two together can be known without anything else. The known substantial is thus constituted by a synthesis of phenomena. Psychology, on the other hand, holds that the synthesis of subject-plus-object is purely phenomenal, and that its factors alone are substantial—object on the one hand apart from