452 AMBROSE J. MCNICHOLL 



lectual process; the intelligible is separated from intelligence, 

 and ontology from idealism. Descartes was able to co-ordinate 

 science and philosophy by thus simultaneously eliminating 

 Euclidian imagination and Aristotelean reasoning. This was 

 a complete break with the medieval tradition, a revolution 

 which based scientific thinking upon the creative force of 

 analysis, and was made possible by detaching mathematics 

 from the apparatus of Euclidean deduction and from the neces- 

 sity of spatial representation. He could thus establish a rigor- 

 ously mechanistic cosmology, which determines the equation 

 on which the conservation of the universe rests. 



Kant, though he discovered this separation of intellect from 

 intelligence in his Analytic of Pure Reason, yet retained both 

 the Euclidian and the Aristotelian procedures as valid. This 

 led him to regard dialectical reason as supreme, and, since it is 

 " incurably sophistical," to look for a speculative metaphysics 

 which would aim at a subjective " imaginary focal-point." 

 This, however, is to insulate philosophy against the method- 

 ology of science, and to consecrate the distinction between in- 

 tellect and reason. This distinction, implying two forms of 

 thought and truth, inspired the romantic movement culmin- 

 ating in Hegel, who sought to make this very opposition the 

 main-spring of the process of reason. 



Once reason sets itself above intelligence, which is essentially 

 the power of judging, and spurns the clear and sure methods 

 of positive verification of judgments, it inevitably demands that 

 the world it knows should show forth its own image. Intelli- 

 gence does not demand this; it is content to judge, to accept 

 things as they are. Hegel's influence, continuing that of Kant, 

 meant that speculation after him should be taken-up with the 

 problem of the irrationality of the world. And if reason de- 

 mands such rationality, and yet this cannot be shown, the 

 problem of the absurdity of reason itself is forcibly raised. 



The univocizing of the concept of science, present as we have 

 seen in Descartes, is carried a step forward by Kant, who not 

 only regards physics and mathematics as prototypes of scien- 

 tific thinking, but replaces the correlation assumed by Des- 



