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INSTITUTES OF METAPHYSIC.
PROP. X.————
The true compromise between Sense and Intellect.28. It may appear to some that psychology, in adopting the counter-proposition with the qualification that sense is, to some extent, or within certain limits, a cognitive faculty, has wisely steered a middle course between two extremes, by which the Scylla of an excessive sensualism is avoided on the one hand, and the Charybdis of an extravagant intellectualism on the other. The truth, however, is, that the compromise here attempted is one which leads inevitably to an extreme, and runs psychology, as might be shown from the history of this pretended science, into one or other of the very excesses which she is anxious to avoid. Moderation—compromise is the essence of all that is good; it is merely another name for order; it is the means by which Providence itself works. But the compromise, if it is to be true and effectual, and a preservative against extremes, must be one of nature's forming, and not of man's manufacturing. It must be brought about by natural laws, and not by artificial conjectures. All our knowledge is itself the result of a compromise between sense and intellect—two endowments, each of which is impotent without the other. And, therefore, to affirm that sense alone, or that intellect alone, is capable of affording cognition, or that either by itself can place anything but contradiction before the mind, is to supersede the natural compromise, and to set up a new one, which is a mere figment of the fancy. This is not moderation; this is not steering a safe via
