our knowledge of the Absolute Being, therefore finite beings must exist before the Absolute Being exists, that the Absolute Being is dependent on the finite, and man has created God. This error is possible only when the methods of concrete and scientific thinking are abandoned, and the notions and processeses of formal logic are mistaken for the beings and actions of the real world.

33. The first Norm or Standard of reason: the true: The Norm or Standard of thinking and knowing.

I. The True is the name of the ultimate genus which includes all the universal truths or primitive principles known in rational intuition, the contraries of which are absurd; they are norms or standards regulative of all thinking and knowing. These truths must be distinguished from facts, which are enunciations of the knowledge of particular realities (facta). It must be remembered, however, that this distinction is not carefully made in the common use of language, scientific or popular. The enunciation of a thought which is the intellectual equivalent of reality, particular or universal, is a truth. We therefore have frequent occasion to distinguish them by a qualifying word or phrase, as universal truth or truth of reason as distinguished from a factual or empirical truth.

The word truth is also used to denote both the subjective knowledge and the objective reality of which the knowledge is the intellectual equivalent. The truths of reason are not merely subjective beliefs, but are objectively real in the sense that they regulate all thought and energy. The principle of causation is not merely a belief of my mind, it is a law of the universe. The correlation of truth and reality appears in the interchange of the words, true and real, as true gold, true piety, the true God.

The English word truth (trow, trowth), gives prominence to the subjective belief. The Greek asta, the unconcealed, gives prominence to the objective reality.

II. The truths of Reason have to us objective reality as principles and laws of things, because they are, as already set forth, constituent elements of rationality eternal in the absolute and supreme Reason.

This accords with the Platonic philosophy, modified as it necessarily must be by Christian Theism. The ideas exist eternal and archetypal in God the supreme reason. The rational ideas of the True, the Right, the Perfect and the Good, and all forms and ideals compatible with them are eternal in the mind of God as an ideal universe before it exists as the universe which we perceive. By his power acting under the guidance of wisdom and love he gives expression to his archetypal

thoughts in space and time, and under the other limitations of finite things. He also gives existence to finite beings constituted rational like himself who, as in their normal development they come to know themselves, know the rational image of God. Here arises a moral system, in which God makes still higher and grander expression of his archetypal thoughts.

Plato sometimes attains this conception. He recognizes the principles of reason as the remembrance of what the soul saw in some former state of existence when in company with God, truths in which God is and in the knowledge of which he is God.* The soul knows God in these truths as the eye by a ray of light knows the Sun. Nor, argues Plato, would this be possible if the eye were not the one of the senses most like the sun. This often quoted observation, that the eye's power of seeing depends on its likeness to the sun, is not understood in its full significance unless we remember that the ancients supposed that the eye when turned towards the sun was, as it were, kindled by it and emitted from itself the rays by which we see. So the rational spirit, because it is itself reason, sees the light of reason in God. Cicero also says that reason in man is "participata similitudo Rationis æternæ" and “ vinculum Dei et hominis." Augustine teaches the same. "Being thus admonished to return to myself, I entered even into my inward self, Thou being my guide; and I was able to do so because Thou wast my helper. And I entered and beheld with the eye of my soul, (such as it was,) even above my soul, above my mind, the Light unchangeable. He who knows the truth, knows what that Light is." Says Thomas Aquinas: "When we say that we see all things in God and according to him judge of all things, we mean that we know and judge all things by participation in his light. For the natural light of reason is itself a certain participation of the divine light." The doctrine that we see all things in God, whatever mistiness and error accompany it as taught by Malebranche and other writers, has at least the significance given to it by Thomas; that man's reason sees the light of the universal reason; that what is the True, the Right, the Perfect, the Good that has true worth, to the reason of man, is the True, the Right, the Perfect, the Good which has true worth, to the universal reason of God; that we know truly even particular objects only as existing in a rational system, and we know them in a system as we know them ordered in unity in accordance with rational truths, laws, ideals and ends. This doctrine that man knows universal principles of reason which

Phædrus, 249.

† Republic, B. VI. 508.

Confessions, B. VII. Chap. X. 16.

Summa Theologiæ, Part I. Quæst. XII. Art. XI.

are eternal in God the Supreme Reason is not a flight of swarming enthusiasm, but is accordant with common sense, is the conclusion of the most profound thinkers in all ages, is the necessary inference from the most sober investigation of the rise and processes of knowledge and the laws of thought, and is itself the basis, whether recognized or not, of the possibility of science. They are the flighty and heedless thinkers who deny this. So in speaking of Anaxagoras, Aristotle said that, "the men who first announced that Reason (2005) was the cause of the world and of all orderly arrangement in nature no less than in living bodies, appeared like a man in his sober senses in comparison with those who before had been speaking at random and in the dark."*

* Quoted by Prof. Robert Flint, History of the Philosophy of History in France and Germany, p. 90.

CHAPTER IX.

THE RIGHT OR LAW: THE SECOND ULTIMATE REALITY KNOWN THROUGH RATIONAL INTUITION: THE NORM

OR STANDARD OF EFFICIENT ACTION.

34. General Significance.

THE principles of reason and all necessary inferences from them when known as regulative of power are called laws. They are laws to power of every kind, intellectual, physical and voluntary.

I. They are laws to intellectual and physical power.

1. To intellectual and physical power they are laws in the sense. that they determine what it is possible or impossible for power to effect. In these cases the relation of the truth to the power as its law is expressed by the verbs, must, can, cannot, and by the nouns, necessity, possibility, impossibility. In this sense these truths are laws of thought. The conclusion of a demonstration in geometry is, "It must be so" it is impossible with the demonstration in mind to think the contrary to be true. In the same sense they are laws to physical power. When we see a stone moving we know that it must have had a cause, it is impossible it should move without a cause. A builder cannot make a structure stable, if it is not constructed according to the principles of geometry and mechanics; it must fall. A projectile of a certain weight propelled by a certain force at a certain angle. of elevation and meeting a certain resistance from the air must describe a certain curve in its flight. All instances are summed up in the maxim, "The absurd cannot be real." No power can give reality to that which contradicts reason. Whatever is real is capable of reasonable explanation.

2. Conformity of the action of intellectual or physical power to the truths of reason as law, is called right, non-conformity is called wrong. A boy's solution of an algebraic problem is right; a steam-engine works right, that is, its action is what it must be if in all its parts it is constructed according to the principles of mechanics.

3. The phrase "law of nature" is commonly used to denote an observed uniform sequence of antecedent and consequent. This, however, is not a regulative principle of reason, but merely a generalized

fact. We do not say, "It must be so," but only that, so far as observed, it uniformly is so. The word law is here used in a secondary sense; it does not denote a true law of reason, and we are not concerned with it in the present discussion. It is important, however, to note the distinction; because observed uniform sequence is not only dignified with the name of law, but also deified as the cause which sufficiently accounts for the existence and order of the universe.

4. Some laws of nature, which are usually regarded as merely uniform sequences, do in reality rest on rational principles from which they derive all their significance as laws. The law of gravitation is commonly spoken of as expressing merely an observed uniform sequence, but in truth this law is not known by experience but is deduced from an a priori mathematical principle. The same is true of the law of the dispersion of light. Also, when science carries an observed sequence beyond the observed facts, the induction rests entirely on self-evident intuition of reason. Also, the laws of mechanics rest partly on the law of causation and partly on mathematical principles both of which are first principles of reason.

II. The principles of reason and all necessary inferences from them are also laws to the will.

1. To the will they are laws, in the sense that they declare what the will in its free action ought to do, what is its duty or obligation. To the will the law does not determine what it is possible or impossible for it to effect, nor declare necessity or what the will must do. Every man is conscious that in the exercise of free will he can disobey law and can exert all his energies to accomplish ends contrary to reason; yet every man is still conscious that the truth of reason is a law which he ought to obey.

2. Conformity of the action of the will with law is right, its nonconformity is wrong.

3. Truth known as law to a free will is moral law, and conformity of a will to law is right in the distinctively moral or ethical meaning of the word.

III. The law to intellectual power, the law to physical power, and the law to free will have the common characteristic of law in that each is a truth of reason known as a law to the action of power. They are the three classes of rational laws or laws of reason. The third differs from the first and second in that it is addressed to rational beings having free will, it commands action and requires obedience, it imposes obligation or duty, and it may be obeyed or disobeyed; but it brings with it no necessity of action. It is moral law. On the contrary the first and second are not laws to free will; they utter no command, they impose no obligation or duty, they can neither be obeyed nor disobeyed, they