Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 1 - Institutes of Metaphysic (1875 ed.).djvu/524

496PROP. IX.———— reversed, the vocation of philosophy. He supposed that the business of this discipline was, not to correct, but to confirm the contradictory inadvertencies of natural thinking. Accordingly the main tendency of his labours was to organise the irrational, and to make error systematic. But even in this attempt he has only partially succeeded. His opinions are even more confused than they are fallacious, more incoherent than they are erroneous; and no amount of expositorial ingenuity has ever succeeded in conferring on his doctrines even the lowest degree of scientific intelligibility. His claim to take rank par excellence, as the champion of common sense, is preposterous, if by common sense anything more be meant than vulgar opinion. When the cause of philosophy is fairly and fully pled at the bar of genuine common sense, it is conceived that a decision will be given by that tribunal in favour of the necessary truths of reason, and not in favour of the antagonist verdicts of the popular and unreflective understanding which Dr Reid took under his protection. Oh, Catholic Reason of mankind, surely thou art not the real, but only the reputed, mother of this anti-philosophical philosophy: thy children, I take it, are rather Plato's Demigods and Spinoza's Titans.

20. At this place, and in special reference to the philosopher (Kant) whose opinions have next to be