third emphatically affirms, I cannot believe that God will inflict everlasting punishment on any man, however wicked; my whole nature shrinks from it. Now we have only to apply the tests of intuition to such assertions to find that we are not entitled to assume them.

III.

In employing first truths we should let it be known that we are doing so, and we should enunciate them accurately, at least so far as to show that we are not making an illegitimate application of them. Without this we may be employing an incongruous mixture of necessary and experiential truth, and using the first to impart a certainty to the other.

IV.

This science of Metaphysics should furnish what Kant says was the end he had in view in his great work, the "Kritik of Pure Reason," an inventory of what he called the a priori truths of the mind. It should seek to classify them judiciously, and put them under convenient heads, logically constructed. It would certainly be of immense use to have a carefully prepared summary of the various truths which can stand the tests of intuition, and which may therefore be employed in every department of inquiry without the necessity of continually stopping to explain and defend them in the midst of a very different investigation or discussion. This is what is attempted in the Second Part of this treatise.

It will be shown that primitive truths are involved even in the practical affairs of life, and in all the deeper sciences. Metaphysics should show how they are to be applied to the various branches of investigation. This is attempted in Part Third.

The author is aware that he is only beginning this important work. What he enunciates may be truth only provisionally. He feels deeply that it may admit of correction and improvement. What he has commenced in good faith he hopes may be completed by others, to the great advantage not only of Metaphysics, but of all branches of science.

The intuitions are

INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL,

each subdivided into

PRIMITIVE COGNITIONS, BELIEFS, AND JUDGMENTS.

It is not easy to determine the precise philosophy of the Sophists, if indeed they had a philosophy. The doctrine of Heracleitus was that all is and is not; that while it does come into being, it forthwith ceases to be. Protagoras, proceeding on this doctrine, declared, Φησὶ γάρ που πάντων χρημάτων μέτρον ἄνθρωπον εἶναι, τῶν μὲν ὄντων, ὡς ἔστι, τῶν δὲ μὴ ὄντων, ὡς οὐκ ἔστιν. This Socrates expounds as meaning ὡς οἷα μὲν έκαστα ἐμοὶ φαίνεται, τοιαῦτα μέν ἐστιν ἐμοί, οἷα δὲ σοί (Plato, Theœtetus, 24: Bekker). Aristotle represents Protagoras as maintaining that τὰ δοκοῦντα πάντα ἐστὶν ἀληθῆ καὶ τὰ φαινόμενα (Metaph. Lib. III. Chap. v.: Bonitz). Again, Lib. x. Chap. vi., this kal yàp ἐκεῖνος ἔφη πάντων χρημάτων εἶναι μέτρον ἄνθρωπον, οὐθὲν ἔτερον λέγων ἢ τὸ δοκοῦν ἐκάστῳ τοῦτο καὶ εἶναι παγίως. It will be observed that in these accounts there is an interpretation put on the language of Protagoras. But there can be no doubt that Plato, and Aristotle too, labored each in his own way to show, in opposition to these views, that there was a reality and a truth independent of the individual and of appearance. It is an instructive circumstance that the Sensationalist school have reached in our day the very position of the Sophists, and regard it as impossible to reach independent and necessary truth, if indeed any such truth exists. We might expect that these men would seek to justify the Sophists, and disparage the high arguments of Plato. Cudworth, speaking of the theoretical universal propositions in geometry and metaphysics, has finely remarked that it is true of every one of them whenever “it is rightly understood by any particular mind, whatsoever and wheresoever it be; the truth of it is no private thing, nor relative to that

particular mind only, but is åîŋlès kaboλikóv, ‘a catholic and universal truth,' as the Stoics speak, throughout the whole world; nay, it would not fail to be a truth throughout infinite worlds, if there were so many, to all such minds as would rightly understand it." (Immutable Morality, Book IV. Chap. v.)

CHAPTER VII.

(SUPPLEMENTARY.)

BRIEF CRITICAL REVIEW OF OPINIONS IN REGARD TO INTUITIVE TRUTHS.

The Greek phi

I. THE PRE-SOCRATIC SCHOOLS OF GREECE. losophers who flourished in the fifth and sixth centuries before Christ, if they did not exactly discuss, did, at least, start the question of man's native power of intuition. The Ionian School, founded by Thales, and continued by Anaximander, Anaximenes, and others, dwelling among material elements, found only the mutable and the fleeting; till at length it was laid down systematically by Heracleitus, that all things are in a state of perpetual flux, under the power of an ever-kindling and ever-extinguishing fire. Running to the opposite extreme, the Eleatic School, of which Xenophanes, Parmenides, and Zeno were the most illustrious masters, appealed altogether from sense (atoonois) and opinion (dóğa) to reason (λóyos); fixed its attention on this abiding nature of things beneath all mutation; dived into profound, but over-subtle, and often confused and quibbling disquisitions regarding Being; and ended by making all things so fixed that change and motion became impossible. It was in the very midst of the collision of these sects that Socrates was reared. Professing to have only a practical aim in view, he yet, in putting down the opposition to that end, indulged in all the subtlety of a Greek intellect, and thus stimulated the dialectic spirit of his pupil Plato, who sought to harmonize the fleeting and the fixed.

II. PLATO. It would be altogether a mistake to suppose, as some have done, that Plato is forever inquiring into the origin of ideas in the mind, like the metaphysicians who came after Descartes and Locke. His aim was of a character loftier and wider, but more

unattainable by the cogitation of one thinker, or indeed by cogitation at all. Nor was it his object to discover the absolute, as if he had been reared in the schools of Schelling or Hegel. His grand aim was to discover the real (rò ŏv) and the abiding, amidst the illusions of sense and the mutations of things. And in following this end he sought prematurely to determine questions which can be settled only by a long course of patient induction, carried on by a succession of observers of the world without and the world within. But in the search he started many deep views of God, of man, and of the world, which have been established by the Bible, and by inductive mental and physical science. 1. He everywhere proceeds on the doctrine that man is possessed of a power of reason (λóyos, or voûs, or vónois) above sense, or faith, or understanding (diávola). 2. This reason contemplates ideas (idéaɩ, or etồn) supra-sensible, immutable, eternal, which ideas are realities. 3. He sees that there is a process of thought, especially of abstraction, in order to the mind rising to these ideas: τὸ ὄν is represented as νοήσει μετὰ λόγου περιο λпíτòν (Tim. 29). 4. The discovery of these ideas should be the special aim of the philosopher, and the gazing on them the highest exercise of wisdom. But Plato moves above our earth like the sun, with so dazzling a light that we feel unable, or unwilling, to look too narrowly into the exact body of truth which sheds such a lustre. 1. He has given a wrong account of the reality in those eternal ideas, making them the only realities; denying reality to the objects of sense, except in so far as they partake of them, and seeming to make them independent even of the Divine Mind. 2. Under the one phrase “idea” he gathers an aggregate of things which require to be distinguished, such as the true, the beautiful, the good, unity and being, natural law and moral law, the forms of objects, and even the universals fashioned arbitrarily by the mind. By heaping together and confounding all these things which should be carefully distinguished, he has given a grandeur to his views, but at the expense of clearness and accuracy. 3. He does not see that ideas exist naturally in the mind merely in the form of laws or rules. account for them he is obliged to suppose that the soul preëxisted, and that the calling up of the ideas is a sort of reminiscence. 4. He does not see how the mind reaches them in their abstract, general, or philosophic form. He does not observe that the mind begins with the knowledge of particular objects, and must thence rise by induction to generals. He thus lays himself open to the assaults, always acute, often just, at times captious, of Aristotle, who saw that the

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general exists in the individuals, and that it is from the singulars that man rises to the universals (Metaph. i. 9). 5. He attaches an extravagant value to the contemplation of these ideas in their abstract and general form. Overlooking the other purposes served by ideas, and their indissoluble connection with singulars, forgetting that philosophy consists in viewing law in relation to its objects, he represents the mind as in its highest exercise when it is gazing upon them in their essence, formless and colorless: 'H yàp axρúμaтós τε καὶ ἀσχημάτιστος καὶ ἀναφὴς οὐσία ὄντως οὖσα ψυχῆς κυβερνήτῃ, μόνῳ θεατῇ τῷ χρῆται· περὶ ἣν τὸ τῆς ἀληθοῦς ἐπιστήμης γένος τοῦτον ἔχει τὸν TÓTOV (Phædrus, 58). He thus prepared the way for the extravagances of the Neoplatonist School of Plotinus and Proclus, who reckoned the mind as in its loftiest state when under intuition or ecstasy which looks on the One and the Good, and who found, I believe, the gazing idle and unprofitable enough.

III. ARISTOTLE. - His views, if not so grand as those of Plato, are much more sober and definite. He has specified most of the separate characteristics of intuition, but I have not been able to find how he reconciles his several statements. 1. He has a power, or faculty, called Noûs, which he represents as concerned with the principles of thought and being: 'O voûs ẻσtì tepì tàs åpxàs tŵv vontŵv Kal Tŵv ŏvтwv (Mag. Mor. i. 35). Elsewhere he shows that it cannot be φρόνησις, nor σοφία, nor ἐπιστήμη, but νοῦς, which has to do with the principles of science: Λείπεται νοῦν εἶναι τῶν ἀρχῶν (Eth. Nic. vi. 6; ed. Michelet). 2. He fixes on self-evidence and independence as tests of what he calls first truths and principles. First truths are those whose credit is not through others, but of themselves: EσTI & ἀληθῆ μὲν καὶ πρῶτα τὰ μὴ δὶ ἑτέρων ἀλλὰ δὲ αὐτῶν ἔχοντα τὴν πίστιν· οὐ δεῖ γὰρ ἐν ταῖς ἐπιστημονικαῖς ἀρχαῖς ἐπιζητεῖσθοι τὸ διὰ τί, ἀλλ ̓ ἑκάστην τῶν ἀρχῶν αὐτὴν καθ' ἑαυτὴν εἶναι πιστήν (Top. i. 1 ; ed. Waitz.) 3. He fixes on necessity as a test. Thus he speaks of necessary principles, and of their being inherent in things: Εἰ οὖν ἐστὶν ἡ ἀποδεικτικὴ ἐπιστήμη ἐξ ἀναγκαίων ἀρχῶν (ὁ γὰρ ἐπίσταται, οὐ δυνατὸν ἄλλως ἔχειν, τὰ δέ καθ ̓ αὑτὰ ὑπάρχοντα ἀναγκαῖα τοῖς πράγμασιν, κ. τ. λ. (Anal. Post. i. 6). Τὰ ἐξ ἀναγκῆς ὄντα ἁπλῶς ἀΐδια, πάντα τὰ δ ̓ ἀΐδια ἀγένητα καὶ ἄφθαρτα (Eth. Nic. vi. 3). 4. In which passage eternity is spoken of as a characteristic of necessary truth. 5. It is a favorite maxim with him that everything cannot be proven. He says that all science is not demonstrative, that the science of things immediate is undemonstrable; for as all demonstration is from things prior, we must, at last, arrive at things immediate which are not demonstrable: Ἡμεῖς δέ φαμεν, οὔτε