Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 1 - Institutes of Metaphysic (1875 ed.).djvu/494

466PROP. III.———— the most extravagant scepticism cannot call in question. No form of scepticism has ever questioned the fact that something absolutely exists, or has ever maintained that this something was the nonsensical. The sceptic, even when he carries his opinions to an extreme, merely doubts or denies our competency to find out and declare what absolutely exists.

2. There is no third counter-proposition; and the foregoing considerations sufficiently explain why there should be none. Psychology has never expressly maintained that Absolute Existence is the contradictory: she must be understood to hold that it is the simply inconceivable by us. But, in cone sequence of having neglected to draw a clear line of demarcation between these two categories—the simply inconceivable by us, and the absolutely inconceivable in itself—psychology has left her opinion even on this point in a state of ambiguity. She has nowhere expressly declared whether Absolute Existence is the simply inconceivable by us (i.e. the non-contradictory) or the absolutely inconceivable in itself (i.e. the contradictory). In short, she has overlooked altogether this most important distinction, and thus has contributed largely to that looseness of thought and equivocation of expression which have hitherto prevented the higher problems of philosophy from acquiring even an intelligible shape.