Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 1 - Institutes of Metaphysic (1875 ed.).djvu/586

558 his name a single unpleasant thought, and I contemplate his powers and the evidences of their exercise with profound admiration.

It has been urged against my system, "that it confounds the province of logic and metaphysics, and attempts to reach real existence, not by belief, but by formal demonstration."

I shall first answer the second clause of this allegation, and then speak to the charge that I have confounded the provinces of logic and metaphysics.

It is not true that I attempt to reach real existence by demonstration. I assume real existence; I take for granted that there is something. I assume this; and I care not what the grounds of the assumption may be called. Suffice it to say, I assume that something is. This I have stated in the most explicit terms in the following passage:—" The science (metaphysics) is not called upon to prove either that absolute existence is, or that it is not, the contradictory. It takes, and must be allowed to take, this for granted" (Institutes, p. 465, 2d ed.) A demonstration is indeed supplied, proving that absolute existence is not the contradictory, although this also might have been assumed. But, that something really and absolutely exists—this is neither demonstrated in my work nor attempted to be so.