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INSTITUTES OF METAPHYSIC.
PROP. VII.————
that "self" is the common element, the "universal" in all cognition, and that, therefore, it cannot by any possibility have a particular cognition corresponding to it, or be known as a particular, as this counter-proposition, the exponent of our inadvertent thinking, maintains.
Psychology adopts Counter-proposition VII.27. Psychology must be understood to adopt the counter-proposition in all its latitude. Counter-proposition VII. is an inevitable consequent of Counter-proposition VI., in which all our cognitions are stated to be, in the first instance at least, particular. How the unity in our cognitions is obtained—how they are reduced to the genus called cognition—is a point which psychology has left altogether unexplained. It is by looking to the resemblances of things, says psychology, and by giving a name to that resemblance, that we reduce things to a genus, or form a class. Very well; one might have expected that psychology would also have told us that it was by looking to the resemblance among cognitions, and by giving a name to that resemblance, that we were able to reduce cognitions to a class; and further, that the point of resemblance to which the name was given was no other, and could be no other—when the whole of our cognitions were taken into account—than the "me," the self of each individual knower. But no; psychology tells us nothing of this kind—teaches no such doctrine—teaches the