Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 1 - Institutes of Metaphysic (1875 ed.).djvu/59

An objection to its method stated and obviated.§ 37. A trivial objection, which must here be noticed, may be taken to the system on the ground that it has borrowed from mathematics a method which is not applicable to philosophy. The applicability to philosophy of the method of strict demonstration, is a question which can be settled only by the result. If the application is found upon trial to be successful, nothing more need be said; if unsuccessful, no argument recommending its propriety can be of any avail, and no argument discountenancing its adoption can be of any use. The case is one which must decide itself; and the point is a point which calls for no argument in the abstract. As for the charge that philosophy has borrowed the method of mathematics, it would be truer to say that mathematics, being a less profound science, and therefore susceptible of a much earlier maturity, have stolen, by anticipation, the proper method of philosophy. It is rather too much that one narrow section of human thought should be allowed to monopolise the whole, and only, method of universal truth.

The polemical character of this system.§ 38. The student will find that the system here submitted to his attention is of a very polemical character—more so, he may imagine, than is consistent with the nature of a scheme which looks only to truth, and to its own exhibition of it, troubling itself with no other considerations. This