COSMIC PHILOSOPHY 



the two orders correspond ? Can we then ever 

 hope to possess an objective canon of truth? And 

 if we cannot obtain any such canon, are we not 

 irresistibly driven to Ideahsm or to Scepticism, 

 — to the philosophy which denies the existence 

 of any objective reality, or to the philosophy 

 which denies that truth can be attained at all ? 



Such questions as these have arisen whenever 

 in the long career of philosophic inquiry an ap- 

 proach has been made toward demonstrating the 

 relativity of knowledge. They dictated the criti- 

 cisms of Leibnitz upon Locke's doctrine that all 

 knowledge is the result of experience. The Car- 

 tesians had postulated the existence of innate 

 ideas ; a postulate which was destroyed when 

 Locke showed that there can be no ideas until 

 the mind has come into contact with environing 

 agencies. But to Locke's reassertion of the scho- 

 lastic formuhyNiki/ est in intellectu quod non prius 

 in sensUy Leibnitz added the important qualifica- 

 tion, nisi intellect us ipse. Rejecting, equally with 

 Locke, the Cartesian doctrine of innate ideas, 

 recognizing fully that there can be no knowledge 

 until the mind has been awakened into activity 

 by the presence of objects to be cognized, Leib- 

 nitz nevertheless maintained that in each act of 

 cognition there is an element furnished by the 

 mind as well as an element furnished by the en- 

 vironment, — that the subject is not passive, but 

 cooperates actively with the object. In all this, 

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