Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 1 - Institutes of Metaphysic (1875 ed.).djvu/519

RhPROP. IX.———— by a fundamental weakness, which was this, that it was rather an exposition of the contingent structure of our knowledge, than an exposition of the necessary structure of all knowledge. As has been stated elsewhere, he does not sufficiently distinguish the necessary from the contingent laws of cognition, or distinctly lay down the former as binding on intelligence universally. He saw that every object of our cognition must contain and present a subjective element. But he neither declared what that element was, nor did he dearly show that all intelligence was necessarily subject to the same law, and that every object of all cognition must involve a subjective or non-material ingredient. Hence he failed to reduce matter per se to the condition of a contradiction; because if matter can be known per se by any possible intelligence—if it can, in any circumstances, be apprehended without some subjective ingredient being apprehended along with it—we are not entitled to set it down as the contradictory in itself. To fix it as this, it must be fixed as the absolutely and necessarily and universally unknowable. Berkeley's system scarcely rises to this position. He has nowhere made out dearly that matter per se is the contradictory to all intelligence, although he may have shown with sufficient distinctness that it is the contradictory to our intelligence. But if matter per se is not the contradictory to all intelligence, it may possibly exist—exist