222 THE SCIENCE OF LOGIC 



establishes between abstract aspects of these things, and whereby it interprets 

 the latter. No doubt, in formulating such relations our intellects are guided 

 by certain absolutely immutable and necessary principles called laws of 

 thought ; we cannot think reality except according to these laws. But these 

 laws themselves the principles of identity, contradiction, etc. called 

 &quot;formal &quot; because they are standards to which all valid thought must con 

 formare not mere innate, subjective, empty intellectual grooves, themselves 

 devoid of material content, mere forms with which thought clothes or invests 

 all its material ; they too are material and have content, because they too are 

 formed by the intellect operating on the data of sense experience. It is only 

 the intellectual faculty of acquiring them that is innate and prior to all in 

 dividual experience. 



These abstract relations, grasped by intellectual thought, continue to grow 

 in complexity under the reasoning power of the mind, and the more complex 

 of them are explained by referring them to the less complex from which they 

 were deduced ; the less complex are a causa cognoscendi as regards the more 

 complex. But we must not forget that this is all in the order of abstract 

 thought, or imagine that concrete reality is also a system in which the 

 simpler element is the causa essendi of the more complex. To conceive the 

 real world as nothing else than a system of logically reasoned, abstract 

 relations, regarded or thought of as objective, is either to ignore the evidence 

 of our senses altogether and regard concrete sense-phenomena as unreal, or 

 else to impose upon the physical world revealed in the data of sense experience, 

 as the only laws that govern it, certain relations that are considered as a 

 subjective product of pure thought independent of sense experience, and which 

 are on that account regarded as of absolute necessity that is, whose violation 

 would be unthinkable. This is simply to ignore the concrete for the abstract, 

 and to reduce reality to a subjective creation of the mind. It gives a fictitious 

 sort of objectivity to that &quot; mental construction &quot; which it calls &quot; the world &quot; 

 or &quot; reality,&quot; and is calculated to convey an erroneous impression about the 

 &quot; necessity &quot; of the laws that govern the physical universe. To conceive the 

 latter as a closed system of activities every fact or phenomenon in which will 

 be &quot; explained &quot; by establishing between it and the whole certain relations of 

 an absolutely immutable character, and to regard nothing as &quot; scientifically 

 known &quot; or &quot; explained &quot; except in so far as it can be shown to be subject to 

 such absolutely necessary relations, is to impose gratuitously a metaphysical 

 or absolute necessity on the activities of physical nature, to accept a one-sided, 

 abstract, unreal conception of the universe, to narrow &quot; scientific &quot; knowledge 

 arbitrarily to the domain of pure abstraction, and to regard the totality of 

 things in the concrete as scientifically unknowable. 



No doubt, if we had an ideally perfect scientific knowledge of any pheno 

 menon or fact, we should know that &quot; it could not possibly be other than &quot; 1 God 

 sees and wills it to be. But no human mind ever has known, or ever can know, 

 any concrete fact or phenomenon in that way. It can know thus only the abstract 

 relations which itself discerns in phenomena. It can know, too, that the things 



1 Cf. ARISTOTLE, Anal. Post., i., 2 ; WELTON, Logic, ii., p. 188 ; cf. supra, 224, 

 p. 98. The only actual reality that &quot; could not possibly be other than it is,&quot; is the 

 Self-existent Reality of the Necessary Being. And the nature of that Being cannot 

 be known directly or intuitively by the human mind. 



