Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 1 - Institutes of Metaphysic (1875 ed.).djvu/510

482PROP. IX.———— comes not within the pale of our cognition. And thus the second consequence of the assumption that material things have an absolute existence, is the inevitable conclusion that we have no knowledge of them, but only a knowledge of their effects. Thus arises, and thus arose, the doctrine of a representative perception—a doctrine which, substituting for the real material universe what Berkeley calls "a false imaginary glare," is alike unsatisfactory to the philosophical, and to the unphilosophical, mind.

5. The earliest form of the representative hypothesis is that which is known in the history of philosophy under the name of Physical Influx (influxus physicus). The advocates of this scheme maintained that real things are the efficient causes of our perceptions, the word "efficient" being employed to signify that the things, by means of some positive power or inherent virtue which they possessed, were competent to transmit to the mind a knowledge of themselves. This theory held that man was cognisant, not of things themselves, but only of certain ideal copies, or intelligible transcripts of them; and that these were caused, first, or remotely, by the operation of material things on the senses, and secondly, or proximately, by the operation of the senses on the mind; so that the doctrine of physical influx was rather an hypothesis explanatory of the way in which the senses or