Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 1 - Institutes of Metaphysic (1875 ed.).djvu/490

462PROP. II.————

1. This proposition and the next supply the premises by means of which Proposition IV. is enabled to eliminate or get rid of the third alternative in regard to Absolute Existence—thus reducing the alternatives from three to two.

2. Second Counter-proposition.—The contradictory is a topic which has never engaged the attention either of natural thinking or of psychological science; and therefore there is, in this case, no exact counter-proposition. At any rate, it is a mere repetition of the first, and may be laid down in the following terms: "There is no middle between knowledge and ignorance; we must either know or be ignorant of a thing, and we cannot neither know nor be ignorant of anything."

3. Not if the thing is knowable or intelligible,—in that case, certainly, we cannot neither know it, nor be ignorant of it, but must either know it or be ignorant of it. But if the thing is absolutely unknowable or contradictory, or that which is not to be known at all, or on any terms by any intelligence, in that case, it is certain that we can neither know it nor be ignorant of it. When taken with this explanation or qualification (see preceding Prop., Obs. 6-9), the correctness of the