THEORY OF KNOWING.
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PROP. IV.————
as to the conversion of the contradictory cannot be distinctly answered until we have found our contradictory, our incogitable, our unknowable. Until that is done, we can have nothing definite to work upon. Hence the importance of reducing matter per se to a contradiction. This reduction is equivalent to a finding of the contradictory; and we have now something under our hands. We can now exhibit the process of conversion by which the unintelligible is translated into the intelligible. This exhibition is indeed the business of every part of the first section of this work. But the explanation could scarcely have proceeded, had the unintelligible or contradictory element of all cognition remained unfound.
In what sense the contradictory is conceivable.21. In speaking thus of the finding of the contradictory, we are very far from insinuating that the contradictory can be known or conceived. It can be conceived only as the absolutely inconceivable. To find it as this is all that is necessary for the purposes of rational truth. In one sense, and when properly explained, nothing is easier than to conceive the contradictory. Conceive the one end of a stick absolutely removed, and the other end alone remaining, and you have a conception of something contradictory. "I cannot conceive that," the reader will say. True, in one sense you cannot conceive it, but in another sense you can conceive it distinctly,—