Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 1 - Institutes of Metaphysic (1875 ed.).djvu/96

68 shape, is a most elusory, unmanageable, and indeed incomprehensible problem. We cannot lay hold of it. It seems to have no handle. It presents no prominence, big or little. Where is the right end of this ball of string? Is it a ball of string, or is it a ball of stone? Because, if it be a ball of stone, it will scarcely be worth while to try to unwind it No man's fingers can untwist a cannon-ball. It is, however, a ball of string, only the difficulty is to find its outermost end; and, until this be found, the attempt to wind it off is of course hopeless. At any rate, let us take especial care (a caution which, as we have already hinted, has been far too little heeded) not to wind on another ball over this one. But to speak less figuratively;—although we have found out that the epistemology is the proximate division of philosophy, we have still to discover what the proximate question is in the vague, confused, and comprehensive problem which occupies this section. The difficulty is not merely to break it down, but to find the fundamental question, the one and true and only beginning, among its fragments.

§ 78. The Platonic Socrates is gravelled by this same difficulty in "the Theætetus" of Plato. Although Socrates sees the difficulty very clearly, he does not see the solution,—or at any rate he keeps it to himself "What is knowledge?" he asks