Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 1 - Institutes of Metaphysic (1875 ed.).djvu/454

426PROP. V.———— structure of all intelligence, and to the necessary laws of all cognition. Hence matter per se is not the simply unknowable and inconceivable to us—it is the absolutely unknowable and inconceivable in itself; in other words, it is the contradictory,—a consideration which dislodges it from our ignorance just as effectually as it dislodges it from our knowledge, as must be apparent to all who have mastered the very simple argument by which this conclusion is established.

11. Unless this conclusion were established, no ontology would be possible, and to the failure to establish it is to be attributed the shipwreck which all previous attempts to consolidate this department of metaphysical science have suffered. Ontology, or the science of true Being, undertakes to demonstrate what true Being is, what alone absolutely exists. But our ignorance being, beyond all question, excessive, we must get the ontological demonstration into such a shape that we shall be able to affix the same predicate to absolute existence—to declare with certainty what it is, whether we suppose ourselves to know it, or to be ignorant of it. By working the system into such a shape that the result is the same on either alternative, a valid ontology may be constructed. But if it were true that we could be ignorant of matter per se, an obstacle would be interposed which would frustrate all our