Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 1 - Institutes of Metaphysic (1875 ed.).djvu/423

RhPROP. XXII.———— declares that nothing objective can be apprehended unless something subjective be apprehended as well. So far this system is true, and moves in a right direction. But the question is, What is the subjective part which must be apprehended whenever any objective counterpart is apprehended? Here it is that representationism goes astray. One part of the subjective contribution (the ego) enters necessarily into the constitution of cognition (a man must know himself along with all that he knows); another part of the subjective contribution (the senses) enters only contingently into the constitution of cognition (a man might possibly know things in other ways than those of seeing, touching, &c.) But the advocates of representationism, from being blind to this distinction, got entangled in a web of perplexity from which there was no extrication. They omitted to make out the analysis, and consequently they must be held either to have elevated the senses, considered as elements of cognition, to the same footing of necessity with the ego, or else to have reduced the ego, considered as an element of cognition, to the same footing of contingency with the senses. Whichever of these alternatives they may have adopted, the consequences were equally erroneous. If we suppose representationism to adopt the first alternative, and to hold that the senses are necessary to cognition—in other words, that no knowledge is possible except to an