LOGIC AND KINDRED SCIENCES. 31 



same being as it is in the mind, not as it is in itself, not as 

 clothed in its real attributes, but as subjected to the process of 

 knowledge, in the modes and with the attributes bestowed on it 

 by the human reason (Ens Rationis]. Metaphysics is thus the 

 most abstract and universal science of Reality ; logic the most 

 abstract and universal science of our Knowledge of reality. 



Whatever is real, i.e. whatever exists or can exist, can be an 

 object of human thought. When the human mind tries to under 

 stand the nature of things, it can, by an effort of abstraction, 

 consider successively their changing sensible properties, their 

 stable mathematical quantity, their inner essence or nature and 

 metaphysical attributes. All these various aspects are character 

 istics which belong to the real being under consideration. But 

 the abstract character of the object as considered by the mind, its 

 universality, and the various other modes and attributes which 

 inevitably affect it from the fact of its becoming an object of 

 intellectual thought these are not real in the sense of being 

 realizable outside the mind : they have no reality other than what 

 they have in and from the mind which gives rise to them, and 

 they are therefore called attributes of reason as opposed to real 

 attributes. When concrete and individual things become objects 

 of intellectual thought they become abstract and universal, and 

 in this state they give rise to mutual relations such as could not 

 exist between concrete individual things : for example, one mental 

 object becomes predicate of another which serves as subject, i.e. 

 one becomes predicable, affirmable or deniable of the other in the 

 mental act of judgment ; comparisons in intension and in ex 

 tension (30) between these mental objects give rise to relations of 

 identity and diversity, relations established in the mental pro 

 cesses of definition, division, classification, judgment, inference, 

 etc. ; and the matter of all these different intellectual operations, 

 from beginning to end, is being, not as it is in itself, indepen 

 dently of thought, but as it is moulded and elaborated by thought. 

 In a word, the formal object or special view-point of logic in 

 studying being is not being itself as such, but being as conceived 

 by the mind the Ens Rationis ; while the formal as well as the 

 material object of metaphysics is real being, simply as such the 

 Ens Reale. 



When the mind concentrates its attention upon things, its abstract ideas 

 of their various phases and aspects have been called by logicians primae in- 

 tentiones mentis first or direct mental views of things and these aspects 



