Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 1 - Institutes of Metaphysic (1875 ed.).djvu/565

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SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION.
537

futed in the corresponding proposition, which is the feeding truth of this section of the science.

The derivative contraditions which it corrects.20. The capital contradiction which the agnoiology exposes, yields as its progeny the following swarm of contradictions: First, that there can be an ignorance of objects without a subject, (Counter-proposition IV.); secondly, that there can be ignorance of material things per se, (Counter-proposition V.); thirdly, that there can be an ignorance of the universal without the particular, and of the particular without the universal, (Counter-proposition VI.); and, fourthly, that there can be an ignorance of the ego per se, or of the subject without any object, (Counter-proposition VII.) Each of these errors is articulately refuted by its appropriate proposition on the general ground that there can be no ignorance of that which is absolutely unknowable.

The concluding contradiction which it corrects.21. The concluding contradiction which the agnoiology despatches, consists in the denial that object plus a subject is the only possible object of ignorance. This denial is expressed in Counter-proposition VIII.; and in opposition to it, the corrective proposition proves that this synthesis is the only thing of which there can be any ignorance, inasmuch as it is the only thing of which there can be any knowledge. It shows that nothing but this synthesis can be ignored, because nothing but