Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 1 - Institutes of Metaphysic (1875 ed.).djvu/449

RhPROP. V.———— ; but having done so, on the mistaken ground of a special incompetency in the human faculties to apprehend them in that condition, they were unable to eliminate them from our ignorance. In point of fact, the very door which shut them out of our knowledge opened for them a refuge under the cover, or within the pale, of our ignorance. And there, accordingly, matter per se has stuck until this time,—a dark and defiant inscrutability.

3. Hence the agnoiology hitherto propounded by philosophers, in so far as they have touched loosely on this subject, has been a tissue of contradictions, inasmuch as it represents us as ignorant of that which it is not possible for any intelligence to be ignorant of, and which we cannot suppose ourselves ignorant of without violating the first principle of reason. Here, no less than in their opinions as to knowledge, ordinary thinking and psychological science move in a series of contradictions, which have their origin in a neglect of the necessary truths of reason, and which, as in the epistemology, require to be corrected by the substitution of true ideas in the place of contradictory inadvertencies.

4. These contradictions are corrected in the theory of ignorance, which is now in the course of being constructed; and as has been said, it owes its whole strength to a sedulous contemplation of