ITS SELF-CONSERVATIOK. 29 



Rightly understood, then, these laws are valid and 

 vital as the laws of thought. They affirm under a pro- 

 gressive series of forms the primordial law of perfect con- 

 sistency in consciousness as the absolute test of certitude.* 

 They are " necessary laws," not in the sense in which 

 Professor Jevons seems to think that expression must be 

 understood, namely, in the sense that they are "laws 

 which cannot but be obeyed;"! but rather in the sense 

 that one's thinking must inevitably be self -contradictory 

 in just so far as it fails to be in conformity with those 

 laws. They are the laws in accordance with which one 

 must think if he is to think truly. The order of the only 

 world we can ever really know is the order of reason, of 

 self -consistency. And this is a " necessary " order, in the 

 sense that it can never change without destroying itself. 

 Whence no thinking can really be true thinking that 

 is, self-consistent thinking -unless it follow this law of 

 the inner necessity of reason itself. 



Doubtless it is in this sense that one ought to under- 

 stand the remark of Hegel that, " True thinking is the 

 thinking of necessity." J 



A. THE LAWS OF THOUGHT ARE THE LAWS OF THJNGS. 



It is certainly not without significance that while these 

 laws are named the laws of thought, they are neverthe- 

 less formulated as the laws of things. At first view this 

 seems a radical inconsistency. And yet it is not neces- 

 sarily so. They are rightly named "laws of thought," 

 because, as has just been pointed out, they are the three 



*This appears to me to summarize the aspects of truth involved in the 

 three laws of thought; though Prof. Jevons expresses doubt as to the possi- 

 bility of such summary statement. "Principles of Science," (3d ed.) p. 6. 



t Ibid, p. 7. t " Logic of the Encyclopedia," 119. 



