Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 1 - Institutes of Metaphysic (1875 ed.).djvu/414

386PROP. XXII.———— the universal and unchangeable laws of knowledge,—the conditions without a compliance with which all cognition and all intelligence are impossible. They lay down the laws not simply of our knowing and of our thinking, but of all knowing and of all thinking.

2. In contrast to these laws, this proposition places before us the main contingent conditions of cognition—those to which we specially are subject—without declaring whether other intelligences may, as a matter of contingency, be subject to the same conditions or not. All that is affirmed is, that they are not necessarily bound by these laws, because we are not necessarily bound by them. The contingent laws are brought forward, in order that their separation from the necessary laws may be effected; for it is of the utmost importance that the two series should be clearly discriminated from each other. Accordingly, they are placed in the smelting-house of speculation, not on their own account, but in order to disengage them from the necessary laws with which they are invariably mixed up in our experience,—just as the founder places the ironstone in his furnace, not on account of the stone, but on account of the iron with which it is combined.

3. This analysis is indispensable, because the