Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 1 - Institutes of Metaphysic (1875 ed.).djvu/94

66 expounders. Who is chiefly responsible for confounding the conceivable and the inconceivable, it would be very difficult to say.

§ 74. The system contained in these Institutes does not make game of the laws of thought. It means what it says, and it stands to what it says. What it declares we cannot think, it declares we can not think. It does not make the tail of an affirmation eat in its own head, as all our popular psychology does. It lays down the laws of thought, not as laws which exist only to be broken, but as laws which exist only to be binding. It teaches that man thinks and can think only in conformity with the laws of intelligence, and not, as all psychology teaches, that man thinks and can think in opposition to these laws. It intends to be taken literally at its word.

§ 75. All other systems controvert each other largely, and at many points. This system is incontrovertible, it is conceived, in every point; but, at the very utmost, it is controvertible only in its starting-point, its fundamental position. This, therefore, seems to be no little gain to philosophy, to concentrate all possible controversy upon a single point—to gather into one focus all the diverging lances of the foe, and direct them on a single topic. The system, as has been remarked, holds this point, no