Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 1 - Institutes of Metaphysic (1875 ed.).djvu/521

RhPROP. IX.———— has done very gross, although unintentional, injustice to the philosophical opinions of his predecessor.

17. In regard to Dr Reid's own doctrine of intuitive perception and his supposed refutation of representationism, it must not be disguised that both of them are complete failures. His ultimate object was to vindicate the absolute existence of the material universe, which, having been rendered problematical by the Cartesian speculations, had been denied on much better grounds by the dialectic of Berkeley—these grounds being, that we could only know it cum alio, and therefore could neither conceive nor believe in it per se. To accomplish this end, Reid set on foot a doctrine of intuitive perception, in which he endeavoured to show that material realities stand face to face with the mind, without anything more standing there along with them. This at least must be understood to have been his implied, if not his express, position; for what kind of logic would there be in the argument—material things are known to exist, not by themselves, but only in connection with something else, therefore they exist by themselves, or out of connection with everything else. Unless, then, we are to charge Dr Reid with this monstrous paralogism, we must suppose him to have held that we apprehend material things without apprehending anything else at