Page:The British Controversialist - 1867.djvu/505

16 it may be, is always something more than is usually regarded as the object. It always is, and must be, not any particular thing merely, but the synthesis of the particular and the universal: it must always consist of a subjective as well as of an objective element; in other words, the object of all ignorance is, of necessity, some object, plus some-subject."

Ontology.—1. "That which truly is, or, as it shall be usually termed, absolute existence, is either, 1st, that which we know; or it is, 2nd, that which we are ignorant of; or it is, 3rd, that which we neither know or are ignorant of; and no other alternative is possible." 2. "Whatever we neither know nor are ignorant of is the contradictory." 3. "Absolute existence, or being in itself is not the contradictory." 4. "Absolute existence is not what we neither know nor are ignorant of." 5. "Absolute existence is either that which we know or that which we are ignorant of." 6. "Absolute existence is not matter per se; in other words, mere material, things have no true and independent being." 7. "Absolute existence is not the particular by itself nor is it the universal by itself; in other words, particular things prescinded from the universal have no absolute existence, nor have universal things prescinded from the particular any absolute existence." 8. "Absolute existence is not the ego per se, or the mind in a state of pure indetermination—that is, with no thing or thought present to it; in other words, the ego per se is not that which truly and absolutely exists." 9. "Matter is not the cause of our perceptive cognitions; in other words, our knowledge of material things is not an effect proceeding from, and brought [about] by, material things." 10. "Absolute existence is the synthesis of the subject and object—the union of the universal and the particular—the concretion of the ego and non-ego; in other words, the only true, and real, and independent existences, are minds together with that which they apprehend." 11. "All absolute existences are contingent except one; in other words, there is ONE, but only one, absolute existence which is strictly necessary; and that existence is a supreme, and infinite, and everlasting "mind" in synthesis with all things."

These form but a poor summary of the materials of the 530 pages of the terse yet multifarious treatise, whose well-knit consecution challenges breakage by any power of analysis possible to human thought. "This system," says the author, "is incontrovertible, it is conceived, on 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." On this point, therefore, we must be polemical, if on any, or we breakthrough the express condition of the controversy; and we have seen no critic yet who has set his face resolutely to confront this problem. Cairns, Fraser, Mansel, &c., have all fought shy of the contest so conditioned. We shall attempt a test of the proposition, and lay it before the reader for so much as he may find it worth. Ferrier's primary principle is, "Along with whatever any intelligence knows, it must has a ground or condition of its knowledge, have some cognizance of self. On this we remark, intelligence is the assumed as in existence, and knowledge