Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 1 - Institutes of Metaphysic (1875 ed.).djvu/410

382PROP. XXI.———— must not everything which any intelligence knows be known on the same terms—be known in conformity to the constitution of its cognitive faculties? and must not every intelligence know itself along with all that it knows? And hence must not every intelligence, when it apprehends this synthesis (whatever the character of the particular element may be), apprehend that which is absolute, inasmuch as it must apprehend that which has no necessary correlative? Kant seems to have thought that although we could not know material things absolutely or out of relation to our faculties, other intelligences might possess this capacity, and might be competent to know them absolutely, or as they existed out of relation to their cognitive endowments—a supposition which carries a contradiction on the very face of it. If "the Absolute" can be known only when it is known out of relation to the faculties of all intelligence, it is obvious that there can be no cognisance of it in any quarter—not even on the part of Omniscience. Kant's refusal to generalise, or lay down as applicable to all intelligence, the law that our intellect can know things only as it is competent to know them, is one of the strangest cases of obstinacy to be found in the history of speculative opinion. Can any intellect, actual or possible, know things except as it is able to know them?