440
INSTITUTES OF METAPHYSIC.
PROP. VIII.————
ible (see Prop. VI. Epistem., Obs. 2), a fortiori the particular element of ignorance—the non-ego—is contingent, variable, indefinite, and inexhaustible, and therefore not to be condescended upon.
The advantage of discriminating the necessary from the contingent laws of knowledge. 8. The advantage of discriminating the necessary from the contingent conditions of knowledge effected in the twenty-second proposition of the Epistemology now becomes apparent. The object of our ignorance must be a subject plus some object. But the subject comprised in this synthesis need not know things in the ways in which we know them, but may be cognisant of them in ways totally different, and the objects comprised in this synthesis may be altogether different from the objects of which we are cognisant. All that is fixed by reason as necessary is, that the object of which we are ignorant should be objects plus a subject; because any other object than this is contradictory, as has been shown, again and again, on necessary grounds of reason. But had this analysis not been effected, the important conclusion referred to could not have been reached. If the discrimination had not been made—in other words, if the necessary laws had been reduced to a level with the contingent laws—objects per se, or without any subject, would have been fixed as the object of our ignorance; in which case materialism would have triumphed, and all the higher interests of man, in behalf of which specula-