Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 1 - Institutes of Metaphysic (1875 ed.).djvu/567

Exposure and refutation of these contradictions.24. The successful performance of this operation makes everything safe. It renders the system impregnable in defence, and irresistible in attack. It brings to light, and at the same time refutes, the contradictions entertained by natural thinking in regard to Absolute Existence. Natural thinking holds that material things per se have an absolute existence, (Counter-proposition VI.); that particular things have an absolute existence, (Counter-proposition VII.); that minds per se have an absolute existence, (Counter-proposition VIII.) These assertions are annihilated by their antagonist Propositions, VI. VII. VIII., by means of the consideration that what absolutely exists must be either that which we know, or that which we are ignorant of. But matter per se, the particular per se, the ego per se, are what we neither know nor are ignorant of (as has been demonstrated in the course of the epistemology and the agnoiology); and these, therefore, are not things which absolutely exist, or of which true and substantial Being can be predicated without giving utterance to a contradiction.

The ninth contradiction which the ontology corrects.25. The ninth counter-proposition expresses the common, and to a large extent the psychological, opinion in regard to the origin of knowledge. It declares that matter is the cause of our perceptive cognitions. But this opinion is contradictory, be-