Mr. Frederick Harrison says man is "the being which is the real discoverer and author of law. ... Laws of nature are not so much the expression of absolute realities in the nature of things (of this we know nothing absolutely), but they are those relations which the human intellect has perceived in co-ordinate phenomena of all kinds. . . . The whole sphere of law is nothing but the outcome of the human intelligence applied to the world of phenomena."* But "the great Human Being," in whose "Human Providence" Mr. Harrison finds "both law and author and minister of law," certainly did not of its own mind and will arrange nature according to these laws; on the contrary, it finds the world arranged according to them. This, positivists like Mr. Harrison would be obliged to admit. Then, we necessarily ask, how came the world to be arranged according to these laws, and how came the Human Being to know them? The Positivist arbitrarily rules this question out as illegitimate. Yet it is a question which man has always asked; and the recognition of a cause beyond man is as necessary in "the great Human Being," and has been historically as constant and universal, as the laws which Mr. Harrison so freely recognizes. If the laws which man finds in the world have no objective reality, then it must be equally true that the world has no objective reality. Then human knowledge ceases, and "the great Human Being," forever cheating itself with illusions, is not the Being on whom man can rest in peace as the supreme object of trust and worship. And again we see that if man has any real knowledge, the principles and laws which are regulative alike of nature and of his own thought, must be principles and laws in an absolute Reason, the ultimate ground alike of nature with its laws and of man with his rational intelligence, and that Reason everywhere and always, in God and man, is the same.

XII. The possibility of science, and indeed of any knowledge, more than the sense of isolated impressions on a sensorium, rests on the following realities:

Through rational intuition man has real knowledge of universal, regulative principles, and in knowing them has knowledge of himself as Reason.

Supreme in the Universe is Reason essentially like our own, and, however transcending, never contradicting the Reason of man; and Reason is everywhere and always the same.

The principles of Reason are universally regulative of thought and efficient power, in the sense that the absurd can never be made real. These realities are the conditions of the possibility of science. Because man is Reason, and because the universe is accordant with

The Creeds Old and New, Nineteenth Century, November, 1880.

rational principles and laws and progressively realizes rational ideals and good, and because it thus expresses the archetypal thoughts of the supreme Reason, it can be apprehended and systemized in science by the rational intelligence of man.

XIII. Atheism must rest on some theory which logically involves the impossibility of knowledge. This is a necessary inference from the positions already established. It is also verified by the history of all atheism which attempts to vindicate itself to rational intelligence. If it is impossible to know God, it is impossible to know anything scientifically in the unity of a rational system.

CHAPTER VI.

THE ULTIMATE REALITIES OF HUMAN KNOWLEDGE.

26. Definition.

By ultimate realities I mean the ultimate kinds or genera of reality which are known in intuition and designated by a common name, and are the objects of human thought. It is conceivable that all the elemental realities known in intuition may be ascertained and named. If this should be done we should have before us and know by name all the ultimate genera or kinds of reality of which it is possible to have knowledge. We may call them for short the ultimate or fundamental realities, and our ideas of them the ultimate or fundamental ideas of knowledge.

Aristotle attempted a classification of the ultimate genera of reality, and called them Categories. Kant, however, has used this word to denote the Root-notions (Stammbegriffe) of the understanding, the pure forms of thought given by the mind itself. Since his day the word has retained the meaning in which Kant used it. Some other word, therefore, must be used to denote the ultimate genera of reality.

27. Matter and Form.

Kant calls the particular reality known in perceptive intuition the "matter" of thought or knowledge; the rational truths and laws which declare its relation to the universal, and which are known in rational intuition, he called the "forms" of knowledge or thought. It has been objected that the latter, as "forms of thought," can have no objective reality; and it has come to pass that any use of the terms matter and forms of thought at once awakens the suspicion that the writer using them denies the reality of knowledge. But in their true significance they carry in them no suggestion of the unreality of knowledge. The "matter" of knowledge is the particular realities known in presentative intuition; its "form" is the truth and laws which express their relation to the universal. Sense-perception and self-consciousness know a par. ticular being in its particular modes of existence. Reason knows the same in its relations to the universal. The "matter" of my knowledge of power is power as I know it in some particular exertion of it; its

"form" is the rational principle that every beginning or change of existence must have a cause. The "matter" of my knowledge of space is extension in its three dimensions; its "form," in which Reason knows it, is the metaphysical principle that space is continuous, immovable within itself and unlimited, and the mathematical principles of geometry. When this true conception has been attained, the controversy about the "matter" and "form" of knowledge passes away, and with it the doubt which it has thrown on the reality of knowledge. The necessary forms of thought are also the forms of things. They are forms of things because originally and eternally they are archetypal in the supreme Reason.

Plato's "ideas" were at once conceptions of the mind and forms or archetypes of things. When we grasp the fact that in intuition we have positive knowledge of self and external being and of universal principles of reason, we necessarily come to the Platonic position that the necessary forms of thought are the forms of things; we grasp in its true significance the principle which has given to Platonism its perennial life, that the truths of reason are at once the laws of thought and the archetypal norms of all existence.

It is the error of Kant that space and time, which he calls forms of sense, and reality, substance, cause, existence and other categories of the understanding, are pure subjective forms of thought, which the mind must necessarily put under phenomena in apprehending them. But we now see that the necessary forms of thought are simply the universal norms or principles of reason; and that these must be the norms or principles regulative not of thought only, but of all existence; because, if not so, reason is false in its constituent elements; what we have taken for reason, the organ of truth, is found to be unreason and an organ of falsehood; and rationality and knowledge are no more.

We return now to the true position. Perceptive intuition is the knowledge of some particular being in some particular mode of existence. Rational intuition is the knowledge of the rational norms of all existence. By reason we know the particular reality as related to truth that is universal, necessary and unchanging, and through this to Reason unconditioned and supreme.

28. Classification.

The Ultimate Realities are of two classes, distinguished by their origin; each of these classes must be subdivided into two:

Class I. Ultimate Realities primarily known in Presentative Intuition:

1. Being.

2. Modes of the Existence of Being.

Class II. Ultimate Realities primarily known in Rational Intuition: 1. Norms or Standards of Reason:-The True, The Right, The Perfect and The Good; or Truth, Law, Perfection and Good.

2. The Absolute.

I mean by "the good" that which Reason estimates by its standards of Truth, Right and Perfection, as having worth, or as worthy of the pursuit, possession and enjoyment of a rational being.

The Absolute is the unconditioned and all-conditioning Being, on which finite beings in all the modes of their existence depend, and in which the norms or standards of Reason are eternal. The intuition of Reason that Absolute being must exist, is a truth. As such it belongs with the True, and is, like every other necessary truth, a law of thought and a norm or standard of judgment. But this intuition opens to us the knowledge of the Absolute or Unconditioned. This properly stands by itself in the classification as the last of all the ultimate realities.

Aristotle classifies the genera of reality in ten categories; Being, Quantity, Quality, Relation, Place, Time, Position, Possession, Action, Passion.* This is evidently incomplete; and the same may be said of all attempts to complete it. But it was begun on the right principle. His categories are not logical predicates of general notions, but realities of concrete being. The ultimate realities are not found by the methods of abstract thought and formal logic, but by those of concrete or realistic thought attending to concrete beings. Kant, on the contrary, develops his categories from the twelve logical functions of possible judgments, and proceeds throughout to logical products rather than to concrete realities. The result is a grand system of what thought must be, empty of all content of known being.

I do not claim that the classification which I present is complete and open to no objection. I present it only as a classification which I have found helpful to use in attempting to set forth the reality, extent and limitations of human knowledge.

It will be noticed that, according to this classification, knowledge begins as knowledge of particular beings in their several modes of existence, proceeds to the knowledge of them in their relations to the universal principles of reason, and issues in the knowledge of absolute being; this is the order of knowing and thinking. On the other hand, in the order of dependence, the Absolute Being is first, as the ultimate ground of the existence of all particular beings and of the possibility of their unity as a universe. In the Absolute Being all truth, law, perfection and worth are archetypal and eternal, and of these the universe of finite things is the ever progressive expression and realization. * Ουσία, ποσόν, ποιόν, πρός τι, που, ποτέ, κεῖσθαι, ἔχειν, ποιειν, πάσχειν. 9. Organon I. Κατηγορίαι.

Topica I.