Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 3 "Philosophical Remains" (1883 ed.).djvu/510

500 they are in fact the "light of all our seeing;" that without them all our knowledge would be a blank, and all our experience impossible. And that, therefore, we may truly affirm that our cognitions, in all their essential qualities, are originated from within, and are native to the mind itself. Such, stated very briefly, is the doctrine of innate ideas.

6. The innate ideas for which this system contends are otherwise called a priori cognitions, or a priori elements of cognitions. They are thus distinguished from any elements which may be supplied to us from without, and which are called a posteriori. The latter are also termed empirical, as depending on outward experience; while the others are held to exist independently of all outward experience, although this may be and is required to elicit them into manifestation. Among the innate or a priori ideas are to be ranked the conceptions of Being, of number, of space, of time, of cause, of substance, of resemblance, of difference. I do not profess to give you a complete list. But remove these conceptions, say the advocates of this psychology, and no knowledge of any kind would be possible; they are the groundwork and conditions and essential constituents of all cognition. Nor if they were removed could they by any possibility be supplied to the mind from without; because the mind could not receive them unless it already had them. They are the conditions under which all knowledge is received into the mind;