Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 1 - Institutes of Metaphysic (1875 ed.).djvu/64

36 These remarks may be sufficient to explain, and also to justify, the polemical character of this work. It carries on a warfare by compulsion, not assuredly by choice. So soon as man is born with true and correct notions about himself and all other things, philosophy will take her departure from the world, for she will be no longer needed.

§ 44. To prevent, then, any mistake as to the object, or purpose, or business of philosophy, let it be again distinctly announced that the object of philosophy is the correction of the inadvertencies of ordinary thinking; and as these inadvertencies are generally confirmed, and never corrected, by psychology, and are thus converted from oversights into something worse, it is further the business of philosophy to refute psychology. This is what philosophy has to do.

§ 45. But this, though an essential, is only the negative part of the business of philosophy. In rectifying the inadvertencies of popular thought, and in subverting their abetment by psychology, philosophy must, of course, substitute something in their place. Yes; and that something is —so that the object, the business, the design, the purpose of philosophy, fully stated, is this, which may be laid down as the Definition of Metaphysic: "Metaphysic is the substitution of true ideas—that