Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 1 - Institutes of Metaphysic (1875 ed.).djvu/87

Rh § 67. But is it altogether essential, the reader may ask, to the purposes of this system, that the necessary laws should be laid down thus extensively? Is it not sufficient to fix them as absolutely authoritative over human intelligence only? Because, if this were sufficient, it might be as well not to carry them out over all knowledge, or to insist upon their being valid for reason universally. But, good reader, this is not sufficient. It is absolutely indispensable (this must be confessed in the plainest terms)—it is absolutely indispensable for the salvation of our argument, from beginning to end, that these necessary laws should be fixed as authoritative, not over human reason only, but as binding on all possible intelligence. It is not possible, therefore, for the system to adopt any such suggestion as that here thrown out. And if the reader has any further misgivings as to the propriety of our course, we would recommend him to consider whether he does not hold that all reason is bound by the law of contradiction as expounded in § 28. Of course, if we may assign to intelligence universally any one necessary condition of thought and knowledge, the whole question is at an end, and must be held to be decided in favour of the views of this system. It. should be added that the system does not assume, at the outset, that there is any intelligence except the human. Such an assumption is not necessary to enable it to get under