Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 1 - Institutes of Metaphysic (1875 ed.).djvu/45

Rh § 24. These considerations may serve to explain, to some extent at least, how it happens that the venerable science of metaphysics should, even thus late in the day, be without any articulate exposition of its most elementary principles. The very circumstance that these principles are elementary, both necessitates and explains the lateness of their appearance. But although no such institutional work exists, we are not to suppose that these principles have been powerless, inert, or non-existent; on the contrary, they have been living seeds which have germinated in luxuriant produce in the minds of all great thinkers, from Pythagoras downwards. But it is certain that these elements, though never dormant, have worked for the most part in secresy and in silence. They nestle away out of sight with wonderful pertinacity; hence nobody knows what they are, and nobody can be told what they are, except by their being shown to him, not in a book about philosophy, but in a reasoned work which is itself philosophy. All preliminary explanations of philosophy and its principles must be more or less insufficient. Farther on, however, in this introduction, the more important initial points of philosophy shall be discussed and adjusted. Meanwhile it may be said, in a very few words, that by the principles, the elements, the rudiments of our science, are meant in particular, its one and sole starting-point,