will apply to the realities, if there be such. Thus, there may or may not be ungodliness or ingratitude in the planet Saturn; but if there be such a thing, we declare that it must be evil and condemnable. It is to be noted that our moral convictions do not imply that we shall certainly practise the good, or that all must be morally good which men declare to be so.

III.

As soon as our original cognition or belief assures us of the existence of an object with certain qualities, or as a judgment affirms a necessary relation, the law of identity comes into operation, and insists on our keeping truth consistent with itself; and in particular, the law of noncontradiction restricts us from thinking or believing the opposite of the truth apprehended. When we know that self exists, we cannot be made to think that self does not exist. Constrained to look on time as without limits, we at once deny that it can have limits. Deciding that every effect has a cause, we cannot be made to believe that it has not had a cause.

We have a conviction that

murder is a crime, and cannot be made to decide that it is not. We have thus necessity in two forms as a test of fundamental truth; in its original or positive, and also in a negative form, founded on the law of non-contradiction. In no case can the conviction be wrought in us that what we intuitively know or believe to exist does not exist, or that the contradictory of a primitive judgment can possibly be true.

It has been remarked by metaphysicians that in some cases we can conceive the opposite of a necessary truth, while in others we cannot. The account given above enables us to see how this should be, and determines whence the differences, and how far they extend. In

the case of our primitive cognitions and beliefs, we can imagine or apprehend the opposite of what we know or believe. We can imagine ourselves not existing at any given time, and that an event remembered by us did not occur. We can conceive, too, though often with some difficulty, the contradictory of synthetic judgments à priori; thus we can apprehend (though we can never decide or believe) that there should be a change without a cause. But, in the case of analytic judgments (see supra, pp. 193, 194), we cannot so much as conceive them contradictory. The reason is obvious. The judgment pronounced is implied in the subject in regard to which the predication is made; and the denial of the proposition would be destructive of the notion with which we start. We cannot conceive of an island that it should not be surrounded by water, for were it not so enclosed it would not be an island.

It should be noticed that the conviction of necessity follows primitive conviction wherever it is found. In what is technically called demonstrative or apodictic reasoning, all the new steps are seen to be true intuitively, and the necessity goes through the whole process step by step. Thus the necessity adheres not only to the axioms of Euclid, but goes on to the last proposition of the last book. It is the same in all other sciences which are demonstrative, as Ethics and Logic are to a limited extent; the necessity adheres to whatever is drawn from first truths by intuitive principles. It is needful to add, that in mixed processes, in which there is both intuition and experience in the results reached, the necessity sticks merely to the intuitive part, and does not guarantee the whole. I suppose there is no doubt of the accuracy of the mathematical demonstrations employed by Fourier in his disquisitions about heat, but there are disputes as

to some of the assumptions on which his calculations proceed. We have here a source of error. In processes into which intuition enters, but is only one of the elements, persons may allot to the whole a certainty which can be claimed only in behalf of one of the parts.

One other distinction requires to be drawn under this head. There are cases in which primitive judgments are founded on primitive cognitions and beliefs, and are thus necessary throughout. It is thus that, proceeding on our primitive knowledge and faith as to time, we declare there can be no break in its flowing stream. But in other cases our judgment may proceed on a proposition reached by a gathered experience. Thus, having found that laurel-water is poisonous, intuition insists that he who has drunk laurel-water has drunk poison. The necessity here simply is, that the conclusion follows from the premises; and the conclusion itself is as certain as the observational premiss, neither less nor more.

CHAPTER V.

CRITICISM OF DISTINCTIONS

DRAWN BY METAPHYSICIANS IN REGARD TO THE RELATION OF INTUITIVE REASON AND EXPERIENCE.

These distinctions fail to express the exact truth because they do not proceed on the reality of things.

I.

THE DISTINCTION BETWEEN THE UNDERSTANDING AND THE REASON. Milton draws the distinction between reason "intuitive" and discursive." Reid and Beattie represent Reason as having two degrees in the former, reason sees the truth at once; in the other, it reaches it by a process. There is evidently ground for these distinctions. But the distinction I am now to examine was first drawn in a formal manner by Kant, and has since assumed divers shapes in Germany and in this country. According to Kant, the mind has three general intellectual powers, the Sense, the Understanding (Verstand), and the Reason (Vernunft); the Sense giving us presentations or phenomena; the Understanding binding these by categories; and the Reason bringing the judgments of the Understanding to unity by three Ideas of Substance, Totality of Phenomena, and Deity — which are especially the Ideas of Reason. The distinction was introduced among the English-speaking nations by

Coleridge, who however modified it. "Reason," says he, "is the power of universal and necessary convictions, the source and substance of truths above sense, and having their evidence in themselves. Its presence is always marked by the necessity of the positions affirmed” (Aids to Reflection, 1. 168). It has become an accepted distinction among a certain class of metaphysicians and divines all over Europe and the English-speaking people of the great American continent. These parties commonly illustrate their views in some such way as the following: The mind, they say, must have some power by which it gazes immediately on the true and the good. But sense, which looks only to the phenomenal and fluctuating, can

not enable us to do so. As little can the logical understanding, whose province it is to generalize the phenomena of sense, mount into so high a sphere. We must therefore bring in a transcendental power call it Reason, or Intellectual Intuition, or Faith, or Feeling -to account for the mind's capacity of discovering the universal and the necessary, and of gazing at once on eternal Truth and Goodness, on the Infinite and the Absolute.

Now there is great and important truth aimed at and meant to be set forth in this language. The speculators of France, who derive all our notions from sense, and those of Britain, who draw all our maxims from experience, are overlooking the most wondrous properties of the soul, which has principles at once deeper and higher than sense, and the faculty which compounds and compares the material supplied by sense. And if by Reason is meant the aggregate of Regulative Principles, I have no objections to the phrase, and to certain important applications of it, but then we must keep carefully in view the mode in which these principles operate.

We may mark the following errors or oversights in the school referred to (1.) Intuitive Reason is not, properly speaking, opposed to Sense, but is involved in certain exercises of sense. There is knowledge, and this intuitive, in all sense-perception. It may be proper indeed to draw the distinction between the two elements which are indissolubly wrapt up in the one concrete act. Kant endeavored to do so, but gave a perversely erroneous account when he represented intuition as giving to objects the form of space and time; whereas intuition simply enables us to discover that bodies are in space, and events in time. There is certainly a high intuitional capacity involved in every exercise of mind which takes in extension, or regards objects as exercising property. And then it is altogether wrong to represent sense as the one original source of experiential knowledge, which is derived from consciousness as well as from perception through the senses. (2.) It is wrong to represent Intuitive Reason as opposed to the Understanding. There is intuitive reason involved in certain exercises of the understanding, as when we infer that what is true of a given class must be true of each of the members of the class. Nor is it to be forgotten that the understanding can abstract and generalize upon a great deal more than the objects of sense; it can do so upon the materials supplied by consciousness, and by all the further convictions of the mind, such as the conscience. (3.) It is wrong to represent the mind as gazing immediately and intuitively on the true or the good, upon the necessary or