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INSTITUTES OF METAPHYSIC.
PROP. VIII.————
undertook to settle how or in what capacity it existed, before they had settled how or in what capacity it was known. And hence, being imbued with the opinion that all existence is particular, they made it their aim to determine, or at least to announce, what particular kind or character of existence the mind, or ego, had. The materialist held, as has been said, that it was either some peculiar form of matter, or some peculiar result of material combinations. The immaterialist held that it was at bottom a particular sort of substance different from matter, and therefore to be called immaterial Differing as they did, they both agreed in holding it to be something particular.
It is known only as the universal.10. Whether all existence is particular, and whether the ego is something particular (be it material, or be it immaterial), is a question with which the epistemology has no concern. This section of the science decides only what the ego is known, and not known, as; and it declares (as it has already declared in Prop. VII.) in emphatic terms, that the ego or mind is not known as any particular thing, either material or immaterial, but is known only as a universal, that is, as the element common to all cognition, and not peculiar to any. The element which every cognition presents, and must present, can have no particularity attaching to it, except the characteristic of absolute univer-