Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 1 - Institutes of Metaphysic (1875 ed.).djvu/425

RhPROP. XXII.———— upon this supposition no ego must necessarily be known or thought of along with it. But this is a species of materialistic ontology which revolts us as much as the other, and is fully more illogical. It assigns to matter an absolute and independent existence; and that step once taken, the descent into atheism is as inevitable (let people struggle against it as they please) as the gravitation of the stone towards the valley, when it has once been loosened from the overhanging mountain-top. But the ontology which assigns to matter per se an intelligible or non-contradictory existence, is founded on an abnegation of all the necessary principles of reason; and therefore the doctrine of a representative perception, if we suppose it to embrace the alternative now under consideration, or to hold that the subject is only contingently known along with the objects which it apprehends, is obnoxious to the justest censure.

14. The system of Bishop Berkeley, also, was vitiated by the absence of this analysis, or by the neglect to distinguish the necessary from the contingent conditions of cognition. He falls into the error consequent on the adoption of the first of the alternatives just referred to. He saw that something subjective was a necessary and inseparable part of every object of cognition. But instead of maintaining that it was the ego or oneself which