PROP. IX.————
quite as irrational as the supposition that it could know itself in no determinate state. Because if the ego could know itself as any one particular state, it could never know itself in any other particular state. It would be foreclosed against all variation of knowledge or of thought; and thus its intelligent nature would be annihilated. In fact, this opinion would be equivalent to the contradictory supposition that the particular could be known without the universal, the determinate state without the ego with whom the state was associated. Therefore the ego, although it can be cognisant of itself only in or along with some determinate modification, never knows, and never can know, itself as any, or as all of these modifications. It can only know itself as not any of them—in other words, as the universal which stands unchanged and unabsorbed amid all the fluctuating determinations or diversified particulars, whether things or thoughts, of which it may be cognisant. Through an inattention to this distinction between the knowledge of ourselves in some particular state, and the knowledge of ourselves as that particular state, Hume was led into the monstrous paradox noticed above; and other philosophers (especially Dr Brown) have run their systems aground, and have foundered on the rocks of ambiguity, if not of positive error, in consequence of the same inattention. The dominant doctrine in
