io6 THE SCIENCE OF LOGIC 



at a rational knowledge of it ; for knowing implies defining, ar 

 ranging, and classifying things ; and the validity of these processes 

 obviously depends on the condition that their objects have abiding, 

 permanent natures. Whatever is knowable, therefore, is reducible 

 to order within a system. But in this sense the unity implied in 

 reality is of course unity of order, unity by relation, not unity of 

 being or essence, as these philosophers would seem to imply. This 

 pantheistic postulate will not stand the test of critical analysis. 

 In the real world, as revealed to us through our senses, we detect 

 a unity of order, but not a unity of being ; we see in it manifold 

 evidences which justify us in inferring that it is created, conserved, 

 and ruled by some guiding intelligence distinct from it ; but we 

 do not by any means see in it only such logically necessary con 

 nexions and relations as would justify us in believing it to be a 

 mere manifestation or evolution of the activity of some immanent 

 intellect. We can prove that the &quot; choir of heaven and furniture 

 of earth &quot; are dependent on Divine providence, on the wisdom 

 and free-will of the Deity, and we can therefore be physically, 

 hypothetically certain of the generalizations we reach by means of 

 induction about the modes of existence and activity of agencies 

 created in time and space ; but absolute or metaphysical certitude 

 about these modes of existence and activity, the very nature of 

 these agencies, and the essential limitations of the human mind 

 itself, preclude us from ever reaching. 



Modern logicians may, perhaps, be tempted to deprecate the introduction, 

 into a treatise on logic, 1 of such metaphysical theses as that God has created 

 and conserves and governs the universe and concurs with its activities, and 

 that man is endowed with free-will, for the purpose of explaining the nature 

 and grounds of physical and moral certitude. But the fact is that these 

 latter cannot be satisfactorily explained, either in logic or outside it, with 

 out adopting some attitude or other as to the ultimate nature, origin, and mode 

 of existence, of this visible univei se which furnishes the human mind with all 

 its data for knowledge. Metaphysical assumptions of some kind are inevit 

 able in logic, even although it is in metaphysics and not in logic that they 

 should be justified. If John Stuart Mill introduces into his logic, as he does, 

 the assumption of the empiricist or phenomenist philosophy, that all reality is 

 ultimately analysable into spontaneously associated sensations of the conscious 

 mind, and if Professors Bosanquet and Welton build their logical doctrine on 

 the idealist assumption of Hegel and Green, which identifies reality with 

 thought by declaring the former to be constituted by &quot; thought-relations,&quot; 

 Scholastics need not apologize for rejecting both the one and the other assump 

 tion as unsatisfactory and erroneous, for attributing a larger role to intellect 



1 cf. JOYCE, Logic, pp. 237-8 ; RICKABV, First Principles, pp. 89, 93, 102. 



