Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 1 - Institutes of Metaphysic (1875 ed.).djvu/532

504PROP. IX.———— the consideration of knowledge as it actually is, and eschewed at the outset all inquiry into its origin. This is the method which these Institutes have endeavoured uniformly to pursue throughout the first section of the science; and to its observance is to be attributed any credit which they may obtain for having steered clear of the shoals and whirlpools which have shipwrecked all previous systems. The following recapitulation may serve as a memorandum of some of the leading points of the system.

28. First, and generally, this system obtains a great advantage in starting from no hypothesis, either affirmative or negative, in regard to the absolute existence of the material universe. The affirmative assumption has disconcerted every attempt which has hitherto been made to propound a reasoned theory of knowing; and the negative assumption is, of course, equally unwarrantable. The system, therefore, indulges; at the outset, in no opinion in regard to independent material existence either pro or con; it leaves that point to be determined by the result of the inquiry into the actual character and constitution of knowledge. To this inquiry it adheres closely until it has exhausted all its details, and, tracking the knowable through all the disguises and transformations which it can assume, has found that, under all its metamorphoses, it is, at