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INSTITUTES OF METAPHYSIC.
has to the absolutely contradictory; yet our philosophers have not thought so. Hence they have laid down a distinction, which is no distinction, but a confusion, a blundering dogma which has been most injurious—which has, indeed, been nothing less than ruinous for a time to the cause of genuine speculation.
This confusion illustrated.§ 70. Suppose that a natural philosopher, dealing with the ponderable and the imponderable (if there be such a thing), were to divide the ponderable into the liftable by us on the one hand (calling this only the properly ponderable), and, on the other hand, into the still liftable, though not by us; and suppose he were to call the latter the unliftable, the imponderable without any qualification;—in that case Ben Lomond would be set down among the imponderables, for it is certainly not liftable by us; It would be classed along with things which are absolutely and in themselves imponderable—if any such things there be. And there are such things, though perhaps natural philosophy takes no account of them. The days of the week are imponderable; and therefore Ben Lomond, according to this division, would have no more weight than those abstractions which we call Monday and Tuesday. This is precisely the distinction which philosophers have generally taken between the conceivable and the inconceivable. Where would natural science