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INSTITUTES OF METAPHYSIC.
PROP. IV.————
you can conceive it as that which neither you nor any other intelligence can conceive. This is the whole amount of the conceivability which is claimed for matter per se. It is to be conceived only as that which no intellect can conceive, inasmuch as all intellect, by its very nature as intellect, can conceive it only cum alio.
Matter per se is not a nonentity.22. Does this contradictory nondescript exist? The answer to that question had better be allowed to ripen a little longer. Philosophers, ere now, have got into trouble by plucking it prematurely. One point the reader may make himself quite easy about. This system is as far as any system can be from maintaining that matter per se is a nonentity—a blank. All blanks, all nonentities, require to be supplemented by a "me" before they can be cogitable, just as much as all things or entities require to be thus supplemented. But matter per se is, by its very terms, that which is unsupplemented by any "me;" therefore it, certainly, is not to be conceived as a nonentity. If idealism be a system which holds that matter per se is nothing, we forswear and denounce idealism. True idealism, however, never maintained any such absurd thesis. But does not true idealism reduce every thing in the universe to a mere phenomenon of consciousness? Suppose it does,—does it not also reduce every nothing in the universe to a mere phenomenon of conscious-