jPEOF. EEEEIEB, ON KNOWING AND BEING. 115 



tology, and in which he prides himself as though it were a great 

 philosophical discovery. The Institutes, he says, " claim to have 

 " announced for the first time the true law of ignorance, and to have 

 " deduced from it its consequences. " But when scrutinized, the 

 theory of ignorance is found to amount to nothing more than an 

 expression of the results of the Epistemology as a function of a 

 new term arbitrarily, though not inappropriately, introduced. "What 

 the .Agnoiology seeks to determine is, the object of ignorance ; and it 

 teaches that the object of ignorance, like that of knowledge, is a 

 synthesis of subject and object. In Prop. I. ignorance is defined to 

 be " a privation of something consistent with the nature of intel- 

 ligence." Hence (Prop. II.) "all ignorance is possibly remediable ; 

 and (Prop. III.) we can be ignorant only of what can possibly be 

 known ; and hence also — if the Epistemology of the Institutes be 

 supposed correct — the object of ignorance can be neither the Ego or 

 subject per se, nor objects (popularly so called) per se, but only a 

 synthesis of subject and object. Now it is plain that every thing 

 here depends on the definition of ignorance as a " privation of some- 

 thing consistent with the nature of intelligence. " The definition 

 is a very good one ; and the deductions made from it are perfectly 

 logical ; but where is the wonderful merit of defining a word 

 and then expressing the results of the Epistemology in terms of 

 that word ? Or what occasion was there for the show and parade 

 of demonstration with which this is done by our author ? Indeed, 

 for any purpose that it serves, the Theory of Ignorance might very 

 well have been omitted altogether. The use to which it is put will 

 be seen when I mention that the Ontology opens by announcing 

 three alternatives of Being. " Absolute Existence or Being in it- 

 self is either first, that which we know ; or it is secondly, that 

 which we are ignorant of ; or it is thirdly, that which we neither 

 know nor are ignorant of. " By showing (as he thinks he has done) 

 that what we neither know nor are ignorant of is the contradictory, 

 and also that Absolute Existence is not the contradictory, Professor 

 Eerrier eliminates the third alternative, and concludes that Abso- 

 lute Existence is either what we know or what we are ignorant of. 

 But (by the Epistemology) that which we know is the synthesis of 

 subject and object ; and (by the Agnoiology) that which we are ig- 

 norant of is the synthesis of subject and object ; therefore, whether 

 Absolute Existence be the one or the other of the two alternatives 

 to which it has been reduced, it must be the synthesis of subject and 

 object. Now surely it was unnecessary to create an Agnoiology, 

 merely to play the part here assigned to it. "Why might the alter- 



