Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 1 - Institutes of Metaphysic (1875 ed.).djvu/422

394PROP. XXII.———— human intelligence is provided, or than any of the other laws to which human intelligence is subject."

11. This counter-proposition expresses the loose opinion of ordinary thinking in regard to the superior claims of the senses to rank as necessary principles of cognition—an inadvertency which psychology has done little or nothing to correct. The chief circumstance to be attended to in connection with it is, that it records with approval an omission which has been exceedingly prejudicial to the interests of philosophy—the omission, namely, to signalise the distinction between the necessary and the contingent laws of cognition.

12. Much of the perplexity and inconclusiveness of speculative thinking is to be attributed to the want of this analysis. To this cause the errors of representationism and the insufficiency of Berkeleianism are mainly to be ascribed. It was formerly remarked (Prop. XI. Obs. 10) that the doctrine of a representative perception is an obscure anticipation of the great law of all reason, which