Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 1 - Institutes of Metaphysic (1875 ed.).djvu/531

RhPROP. IX.———— that the words a priori, or native, on the one hand, and a posteriori, or empirical, on the other, apply only to the elements of our ideas, and not to our ideas themselves. But he more frequently repeats the old error, characterising some of our cognitions as a priori, or original, and others as empirical or acquired. At any rate, his misconception of the true doctrine is proved by the consideration that he nowhere proclaims that the empirical element of cognition (that supplied by the senses) is nonsensical and contradictory, when divorced from the element which is supplied by the mind; and conversely, that the latter element is nonsensical and contradictory, unless when associated with some empirical or extraneous ingredient. Not having made this announcement Kant must be held to have missed the true theory, and to have taught a doctrine of innate ideas fully as untenable and inept as any propounded by his predecessors. He regards matter per se as the cause of our sensible cognitions; and altogether he cannot be complimented on having thrown any new light on the origin of knowledge, or on having extricated the controversy from the confusion into which it had run.

27. The errors and perplexities which have been passed under review might have been avoided, had philosophers addressed themselves assiduously to