nor yet in that which science assigns to it, a “physical necessity.” Law in its highest sense is the type or form, perceived by reason as that toward which phenomena tend, but which they always fail to reach. It was shown by Kant that all physical laws depend for their validity on logical laws. These are not authoritative, like the former, but purposive only. But their purpose is clear, to wit, the attainment of proportion, consistency or truth. As this purpose is reached only in the abstract form, this alone gives us the absolutely true in which reason can rest.
In the concrete, matter shows the law in its efforts toward form, mind in its struggle for the true. The former is guided by physical force, and the extinction of the aberrant. The latter, in its highest exhibition in a conscious intelligence, can alone guide itself by the representation of law, by the sense of Duty. Such an intelligence has both the faculty to see and the power to choose and appropriate to its own behoof, and thus to build itself up out of those truths which are “from everlasting unto everlasting.”
A purely formal truth of this kind as something wholly apart from phenomena, not in any way connected with the knowledge derived through the senses, does not admit of doubt and can never be changed by future conquests of the reasoning powers. We may rest upon it as something more permanent than matter, greater than Nature.
Such was the vision that inspired the noble lines of Wordsworth:—
“What are things eternal?—Powers depart,
Possessions vanish, and opinions change,
And passions hold a fluctuating seat;
But, by the storms of circumstance unshaken,
And subject neither to eclipse nor wane,
Duty exists; immutably survive
For our support, the measures and the forms
Which an abstract intelligence supplies;
Whose kingdom is where time and space are not.”
There is no danger that we shall not know what is thus true when we see it. The sane reason cannot reject it. “The true,” says Novalis, “is that which we cannot help believing.” It is the perceptio per solam essentiam of Spinoza. It asks not faith nor yet testimony; it stands in need of neither.
Mathematical truth is of this nature. We cannot, if we try, believe that twice two is five. Hence the unceasing effort of all science is to give its results mathematical expression. Such truth so informs itself with will that once received, it is never thereafter alienated; obedience to it does not impair freedom. Necessity and servitude do not arise from correct reasoning, but through the limitation of fallacies. They have nothing to do with
“Those transcendent truths
Of the pure intellect, that stand as laws
Even to Thy Being’s infinite majesty.”
It is not derogatory, but on the contrary essential to the conception of the Supreme Reason, the Divine Logos, to contemplate its will as in accord and one with the forms of abstract truth. “The ‘will of God’ ” says Spinoza, “is the refuge of ignorance; the true Will is the spirit of right reasoning.”
This identification of the forms of thought with the Absolute is almost as old as philosophy itself. The objections to it have been that no independent existence attaches to these forms; that they prescribe the conditions of thought but are not thought itself, still less being; that they hold good to thought as known to man’s reason, but perchance not to thought in other intelligences; and, therefore, that even if through the dialectical development of thought a consistent idea of the universe were framed, that is, one wherein every fact was referred to its appropriate law, still would remain the inquiry, Is this the last and absolute truth?
The principal points in these objections are that abstract thought does not postulate being; and that possibly all intelligence is not one in kind. To the former objection the most satisfactory, reply has been offered by Professor J. F. Ferrier. He has shown that the conception of object, even ideal object, implies the conception of self in the subject; and upon this proposition which has been fully recognized even by those who differ from him widely, he grounds the existence of Supreme Thought as a logical unity. Those who would pursue this branch of the subject further, I would refer to his singularly able work.43–1
The latter consideration will come up in a later chapter. If it be shown that all possible intelligence proceeds on the same laws as that of man, and that the essence of this is activity, permanence, or truth—synonymous terms—then the limitation of time ceases, and existence not in time but without regard to time, is a necessary consequence. Knowledge through intellection can alone reach a truth independent of time; that through sensation is always relative, true for the time only. The former cannot be expressed without the implication of the conceptions of the universal and the eternal as “dominant among the subjects of thought with which Logic is concerned;”44–1 and hence the relation which the intellect bears to the absolute is a real and positive one.
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