Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 1 - Institutes of Metaphysic (1875 ed.).djvu/83

these interests to suffer from our inability to keep our faculties, at all times, upon a level with her astonishing revelations. To make truth contingent on the ordinary susceptibilities of man, would be to reduce her to a most deplorable dependency. To be distrustful of her, because our minds are not, at all times, or often, equal "to the height of her great argument," is no unfrequent practice; but it is carrying scepticism a little too far. It is probable that many philosophers, and more people than they, have actually regarded truth as untrue, because man's faculties are incapable of grasping her deepest disclosures, except at rare intervals, and when on their widest stretch. But why can we not be satisfied in metaphysics, as we are in every other science, with knowing the demonstrated conclusions without thinking it necessary, at every moment, to realise them, as it is called? In philosophy alone, people are very prone to set down their own incompetency to realise the truth, to bring it home to their homely convictions, as, in a manner, fatal to her cause. But this incompetency is a mere accident, it is entitled to no consideration; and it is not held, by these very people, to prejudice the truth in any other science. Why should it, then, in metaphysics? People pay a very poor compliment not only to the truth, but also to the higher reason with which they have been endowed, when they suppose that the latter is subject to the juris-