Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 1 - Institutes of Metaphysic (1875 ed.).djvu/53

Rh name. This misapplication, or lax employment of the criterion, was Kant's doing; and frightful confusion has been the result. In our own country Kant's example has been followed, and to some extent preceded. The necessary truths of reason, when touched upon by our philosophers, have been so uncritically sifted; they have been so mixed up and confounded with the truths of mere contingency,—the two classes being, to a large extent, absolutely placed on a par in point of authority, whereby the distinction between them is rendered void and of no effect,—that the prospects of our philosophy, and the interests of speculative thought, would have been fully more promising had the necessary truths not been meddled with at all.