Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 1 - Institutes of Metaphysic (1875 ed.).djvu/450

422PROP. V.———— the necessary truths of reason. Unlike the ordinary doctrine which discharges matter per se from our knowledge, on the grounds of the limitation of our cognitive faculties, and thus consigns it to the province of our ignorance, this system eliminates it From our knowledge on the necessary principles of all reason, and thus eliminates it equally from our ignorance. It shows that matter per se is not a thing to be known on any terms by any intelligence, because oneself or the ego must always be known along with it;—in short, it dissolves into a contradiction this hitherto obstinate insolubility, and thus expels it from our ignorance just as much as from our knowledge, because it is obvious that there can be no ignorance of the contradictory, or of that of which there can be no knowledge. If any flaw can be detected in this reasoning, its author will be the first to admit that these Institutes are, from beginning to end, a mere rope of sand; but if no flaw can be detected in it, he begs to crave for them the acknowledgment that they are a chain of adamant.

5. The agnoiology carries out and completes the work entered on in the epistemology. In the epistemology we beheld only the backs—the dorsal fins, if we may so speak—of the necessary truths; in the agnoiology we see under them, and all round them. We look upon them—like Horace's first mariner on the swimming sea-monsters—siccis oculis, as they