Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 1 - Institutes of Metaphysic (1875 ed.).djvu/559

Rh of cognition can, in any case, consist of less than an objective part and a subjective part. Psychology holds that the objective part of a cognition can be known by itself, and that the subjective part of a cognition can be known by itself; or that each of these parts is a possible, if not actual, unit or minimum of knowledge. Proposition III. corrects this contradiction (which is merely a more explicit form of Counter-proposition II.), by showing that the two parts, objective and subjective together, are required to make up the unit or minimum of cognition, and that each factor by itself is necessarily less than can be known by any intelligence.

10. Counter-propositions IV. and V. express contradictions which are merely more special examples of those which have gone before. Natural thinking advocates our knowledge of material things per se, and psychology, if it abandons this position, contends, at any rate, for our knowledge of certain material qualities per se. This contradiction is one which it is of the utmost importance to point out and correct, inasmuch as it is the basis of materialism—a system which, if it could be substantiated, and an independent existence accorded to material things, would extinguish all the brightest hopes and loftiest aspirations of our nature. The counter-propositions, however, in which these errors are embodied, are effectually subverted by