Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 1 - Institutes of Metaphysic (1875 ed.).djvu/548

520PROP. X.——————— surrounded, or the thoughts or feelings by which he is visited; every man is ignorant (in the strict sense of having no experience) of all absolute existence except this—his own individual case. But a man is not ignorant of all absolute existences except himself and his own presentations, in the sense of having no conception of them. He can conceive them as conceivable, that is to say, as non-contradictory. He has given to him, in his own case, the type or pattern by means of which he can conceive other cases of absolute existence. Hence he can affirm, with the fullest assurance, that he is surrounded by Absolute Existences constituted like himself, although it is impossible that he can ever know them as they know themselves, or as he knows himself. He will find, however, that every attempt to construe to his mind an absolute and real existence which is not a synthesis of subject and object, resolves itself into a contradiction, and precipitates him into the utterly inconceivable. But although absolute existences are innumerable—although every example of objects plus a subject is a case of Absolute Existence—there is, nevertheless, only one Absolute Existence which is strictly necessary, as the next and concluding proposition of the ontology will show.

10. Tenth Counter-proposition.—"Absolute Existence is not the synthesis of the subject and