34 JOHN A, OESTERLE 



are more and more provisional in the sense that we deliberately 

 posit terms, vague and uncertain, which our mind is free to 

 invest with intentions of universality, and thereupon seek to 

 establish relations between those terms. Our mind has this 

 power because it can bring together things which in nature 

 are not 'per se connected, e. g., " man walks " or " man is 

 white." In these examples we do attain a truth, however, since 

 we do not mean that every man is walking or that every man is 

 white. But what we learn from such examples is that what 

 is accidentally one in nature can be brought together by the 

 intellect to form a proposition that is per se one as a proposi- 

 tion. Moreover, the mind can go further than that, and in 

 fact must do so, positing terms and bringing them together 

 for the purpose of getting behind the appearances upon which 

 our posits are based.* 



Verisimilitude, either with respect to terms or with respect 

 to composition or division, is the proper basis of universality 

 ut nunc. By verisimilitude we mean that which may in fact 

 have no more than a resemblance to truth, a mere appearance 

 of it and recognized as being no more than that. This is enough 

 for our mind to reach out beyond what we really know, beyond 

 what is warranted. Actually, universality for the time being 

 keeps us within the bounds of the mind, as any opinion does, 

 so long as it is no more than opinion. But opinion, as dialectic 

 in general, has the nature of a tool, an organon, with respect 

 to truth. Constructed universals of the type v*^e are concerned 

 with (as distinguished from the relation of universality we may 

 tentatively invest them with) are logical organa. For dialectics 

 as logica utens does not go beyond the stage of instrumentality. 



There is in all of this something of a paradox which we should 

 notice. The mind goes beyond what it really knows, but in 

 so doing it still remains within its own confines. How does this 

 occur.'^ A situation analogous to this is the one already noted, 

 of the mind's composing a proposition that is one per se about 



* Aristotle was certainly aware of this procedure. See, for example, De Caelo, III, 

 chap. 7. 



