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INSTITUTES OF METAPHYSIC.
PROP. VI.————
on this gigantic theme, and vainly imagines that she has settled it for ever. But the wheel of controversy still moves round in darkness, and no explanation hitherto offered has sufficed to arrest the flying truth or to dispel the gloom. Realism, conceptualism, and nominalism, have all been tried in vain: they are all equally at fault. These quack medicaments bring no relief. These shallow words are not the
Verba et voces quibus hunc lenire dolorem
Possis.
No one knows where the exact point of the controversy—the true cause of the confusion—lies. To reach the source of the mischief, as well as the healing springs, the whole question, both in itself and in its history, must be excavated anew.
A preliminary ambiguity.13. A preliminary ambiguity presents itself. The doctrine of the particular and the universal, whether considered in relation to knowledge, or in relation to existence, is nowhere embodied by Plato in any distinct proposition. It may, therefore, mean either, first, that every cognition is both particular and universal; in other words, that each cognition has a part peculiar to itself, and a part common to all cognition—is, in short, a synthesis of both factors, as affirmed in this sixth proposition; or, secondly, it may mean that every cognition is either particular or universal; in other words, that some cognitions contain only that which is peculiar to them, while