Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 1 - Institutes of Metaphysic (1875 ed.).djvu/76

solution of those which naturally come first; and, therefore, the latter cannot be entertained until after the former have been disposed of. Each answer, as it wards off its own question, must always be of such a character as to bring round a new question into view. This is exemplified in the case of the answer which wards off the general problem of ontology. The question, in its shortest form, is, What is? And the parrying answer is—What is, is what is known. But that answer, while it sends away from us, in the mean time, the ontological question, instantly brings before us a new question, or rather new section of questions—this: But what is known, and what is knowing? This movement determines an-other whole section of philosophy; indeed, it completes the revolution, or at least we have now merely to find out the truly first question in regard to knowing and the known, to have before us the true beginning, the really proximate question of philosophy. This division explores and explains the laws both of knowing and of the known—in other words, the conditions of the conceivable; laying out the necessary laws, as the laws of all knowing, and all thinking, and the contingent laws as the laws of our knowing and of our thinking. This section of the science is properly termed the epistemology—the doctrine or theory of knowing, just as ontology is the doctrine or theory of being (λόγος τῆς ἐπιστήμης—the science of true knowing). It answers the