Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 1 - Institutes of Metaphysic (1875 ed.).djvu/467

RhPROP. VIII.———— 7. Further, it must be borne in mind that this proposition does not profess to define the object of all ignorance in terms more definite than the general statement that it must always be a thing or a thought of some kind or other in union with an intelligent mind. It must be this, because this synthesis alone can be known. The system, however, is very far from professing to declare what the unknown things or thoughts may be, or what the powers of the unknown subject may be, or what the special nature of the unknown synthesis may be which subsists between it and its objects. All these may be, and indeed are (except in our own individual cases), points of which we are profoundly ignorant, and about which we cannot speak with any degree of certainty. So that lying between the two extremes which bound the object of our ignorance—a subject on the one hand, and objects on the other—there is scope for an infinitude of unknown details. We are ignorant of the particular element which is in synthesis with the universal subject, we are ignorant of the special capacities of the universal subject, we are ignorant of the nature of the synthesis. In a word, all that can be definitely and demonstrably fixed as the object of all ignorance is, as has been said, that it is some subject, or ego, in union with some object, or non-ego. The particular element of cognition—the non-ego—is contingent, variable, indefinite, and