Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 1 - Institutes of Metaphysic (1875 ed.).djvu/466

438PROP. VIII.———— it consists of." Our psychologists are that grocer. We ask them what ignorance is, and what we are ignorant of? and they reply that, while our knowledge is as mere dust in the balance, our ignorance is so great that it might ballast the whole British navy. This, as has been said, is to mistake a question as to quality, for a question as to quantity—rather a serious error for a philosopher to fall into.

6. It must not be supposed that this proposition by which the limits of our ignorance are marked out, and its object defined and demonstrated, has any tendency to question the extent, or to deny the magnitude of our ignorance. It rather doubles it. This circumscription leaves to our ignorance "ample room and verge enough"—as will be apparent immediately. Its effect merely is to prevent us from thinking or talking absurdly about ignorance. In pointing out the object of all ignorance, it fixes merely the bounding extremes, the standard factors, the supporting uprights, as they may be termed, which limit ignorance, properly so called, to its own entire object, and prevent it both from slipping over upon nonsensical half-objects, and from being confounded with that inevitable nescience of the contradictory which is the prime characteristic of reason, but which it is extremely apt to be mistaken for, unless due precaution be observed to guard against so portentous an inadvertency.