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INSTITUTES OF METAPHYSIC.
PROP. IV.————
reason, and which have to be redeemed into cognition.
Importance of finding the contradictory.20. The next question is, How is this redemption effected? How does the contradictory cease to be contradictory; how does the incogitable become cogitable; how does the absolutely unknowable become known? That was the form in which the problem of philosophy usually presented itself, although not very clearly, to the thinkers of antiquity. That was the form under which Plato viewed it, when he described philosophy as the means by which the human soul was converted from ignorance to knowledge. His description would have been more exact had he said that philosophy was not so much this conversion itself, as an explanation of the process by which the conversion was effected—in other words, was explanatory of the way in which the contradictory element contained in every object of cognition was overcome, not by philosophers only, but by all mankind,—the only difference being that the philosopher overcame the contradiction, and knew the process how, while the common man equally overcame it, without being conscious of the means which he employed. But whatever the explanation may be—whether by calling attention, as Plato did, to his "ideas," or, as this system does, to the "me," as the redeeming element—it is obvious that the question