But there is need of a concurrence of circumstances in order to this faculty operating. But instead of confusedly binding all these up in the one expression "occasion," it is better to spread them out individually, when it will be found that each acts in its own way. Thus we should show that an action of the organism is needful to call our intuition of sense-perception into exercise. We should show, too, that an apprehension of an object or objects is needed, in order to call into action our intuitions as to the infinity of time, and eternal relations, and moral good; and then it may be seen that this apprehension may not have been got from sense, and that in our primary cognition of the object there may have been intuition; thus, it is because we intuitively know every object as having being, that we declare its identity of being at different times. Again, in respect to the generalized maxim, or notion, the account is fitted to leave a very erroneous impression, for it makes it appear as if it were upon the occasion of the presentation of a material object that there springs up the abstract idea of space; and of an event becoming known, that there arises the idea of time; or of a succession of events being apprehended, that the mind forms an idea of cause. It is all true that there must be experience in order to the construction of the abstract or general notion, but the notion is formed, after all, by the ordinary process of abstraction and generalization.

BOOK III.

ONTOLOGY.

CHAPTER I.

KNOWING AND BEING.

THESE are topics which the subtle Greek mind delighted to discuss from the time that reflective thought was first awakened within it; that is, from at least five hundred years before the Christian era. I confess I should like to have been present when they were handled on that morning when Socrates, as yet little more than a boy, met the aged Parmenides, so venerable with his noble aspect and hoary locks, and Zeno, tall and graceful, and in the vigor of his manhood, in the house of Pythodorus, in the Ceramicus, beyond the walls of Athens. At the same time, I fear that, after all, I could have got little more than a glimpse of the meaning of the interlocutors. It is clear that even Socrates himself is not sure whether he is listening to solid argument, or losing himself among verbal disquisitions and dialectic sophistries. And who will venture to make intelligible to a modern mind even to a Teutonic mind the arguments by which Parmenides and Zeno prove that Being is One, and the impossibility of Non-Being; or translate with a meaning, into any other tongue, the subtleties of those Dialogues, such as Parmenides and the Sophist, in which Plato makes his speakers discourse of

1 See the opening of the Parmenides of Plato.

the One and of the Existing? The grand error of all these disputations arises from those who conduct them imagining that pure truth lies at the bottom of the well, whereas it is at the surface; and in going past the pure waters at the top, they have only gone down into mud and stirred up mire. We are knowing, and knowing being, at every waking hour of our existence, and all that the philosopher can do is to observe them, to separate each from the other, and from all with which it is associated, and to give it a right expression. But the ancient Greeks, followed by modern metaphysicians, imagined that they could do more, and so have done infinitely less. They have tried to get a more solid foundation for what rests on itself, and so have made that insecure which is felt to be stable. They have labored to make that clearer which is already clear, and have thus darkened the subject by assertions which have no meaning. They have explained what might be used to explain other truths, but which itself neither requires nor admits of explanation, and so have only landed and lost themselves in distinctions which proceed on no differences in the nature of things, and in mysteries of their own creation.

Knowing, in the concrete, is a perpetual mental exercise, ever under the eye of consciousness; and we can by an intellectual act separate it from its object, and contemplate it in the abstract. In all acts of knowledge we know Being in the concrete; that is, we know things as existing, and we can separate in thought the thing from our knowledge of it, and the thing as existing from all else which we may know about the thing. The science which treats of Being, or Existence, is Ontology. If we define Ontology as the science of what we know of things intuitively, we are giving it a precise field which

can be taken in from the waste and cultivated. Gnosiology and Ontology may be treated to a great extent together in Metaphysics. Still they can be distinguished, and the distinction between them should be steadily kept in view. The one seeks to find what are our original powers, the other to determine what we know of things by these powers.

In order to reach this second end, we must go over, one by one, the various classes of objects known by our intuitive powers; but this not, as in Gnosiology, to determine what the power is, but what is the object which it looks at. I have been seeking to accomplish the one as well as the other of these all throughout this treatise. By simple cognitive or presentative powers (as Hamilton calls them), we know objects in the singular and in the concrete; by consciousness we know self as having being, and capable of thought and feeling; by perception we know body as extended and resisting pressure; and by both we know self and not-self as having an existence independent of the mind contemplating them. By the reproductive powers we are led to believe in the past event recalled by memory as real, that is, as having occurred in time past; and round space, known in the concrete in perception, and time, known with the event in reminiscence, there gather a number of beliefs which can be ascertained and expressed. Among the objects thus known or believed in, and, it should be added, imagined out of the materials supplied by the cognitive and reproductive powers, the mind can discern necessary relations, that is, arising from the very nature of the objects. The mind, too, is led to know and believe in a moral excellence in the voluntary acts of intelligent beings, and to discover the bearings and relations of moral good and evil.

Such a survey as this enables us to determine what are the kinds of reality which the mind is able to discover. In sense-perception and consciousness it is a real thing, known as having certain qualities. In our beliefs, too, we look to a real thing having attributes. We believe, we must believe, space and time to have an existence, not as mere forms of thought, but altogether independent of the contemplative mind. Our judgments may or may not look to a reality, for we may discover relations among imaginary as well as among actual objects. But when the objects are real the relations discovered are also real. The reality discovered by the moral power lies in a quality of certain voluntary acts performed by persons possessed of conscience and free will. We thus see how such an inspection settles for us not only that there is a reality, but what is the sort of reality; whether a present or an absent reality, whether an independent reality or a reality in objects. Thus we maintain that abstract and general notions have a reality when the objects from which they are drawn are real; but we are not to understand, as Plato's language would lead us to believe, that they have a reality independent in some intelligible world. The relations of quantity treated of in mathematics have a reality, but it is only in space and time, and in bodies as occupying space and existing in time. Cause and effect have a reality independent of the mind which observes them; but this is, after all, in the substances which act and are acted on. Moral good and sin are certainly both real, but their actuality is in the dispositions of responsible beings.

I flatter myself that by the account given in this treatise, I have avoided the error of those who would dissociate the native laws of the mind from things. Some give à priori principles a formative power in the