Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 1 - Institutes of Metaphysic (1875 ed.).djvu/421

RhPROP. XXII.———— thing or thought, and plus some mode or modes of apprehension.

9. By these explanations, however, the constitution of the synthesis of all cognition is in no respect essentially altered. It still remains what it has been declared throughout this work to be—subject + object, the word object being used in the most general sense in which it can be employed to signify any thing, or thought, or state of mind whatsoever, of which any intelligence may be cognisant. And the conclusion which the epistemology gives out as its main result is, that this synthesis, or, as it may be also termed, the known absolute, is the only possible object which any intelligence can ever apprehend. Pursue the object of knowledge or of thought through all the metamorphoses which it may be conceived to undergo, and it will never turn up as anything but this—the unity of subject and object. Try to fix it as anything but this, and the attempt will invariably terminate in a contradiction.

10. Twenty-second Counter-proposition.—"The senses are not more contingent than any of the other conditions of human knowledge. On the contrary, they are more indispensable to the attainment of knowledge than any of the other means with which