16 COSMIC PHILOSOPHY. [pt. i. 



Such questions as these have arisen whenever in the long 

 career of philosophic inquiry an approach has been made 

 toward demonstrating the relativity of knowledge. They 

 dictated the criticisms of Leibnitz upon Locke's doctrine that 

 all knowledge is the result of experience. The Cartesians 

 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 environ- 

 ing agencies. But to Locke's reassertion of the scholastic 

 formula, Nihil est in intellects, quod non, prius in sensu, Leib- 

 nitz added the important qualification, nisi intellectus vpie. 

 Rejecting, equally with Locke, the Cartesian doctrine of 

 innate ideas, recognizing fully that there can be no know- 

 ledge until the mind has been awakened into activity by 

 the presence of objects to be cognized, Leibnitz nevertheless 

 maintained that in each act of cognition there is an element 

 furnished by the mind as well as an element furnished by 

 the environment, — that the subject is not passive, but co- 

 operates actively with the object. In all this, let us note, 

 there is nothing that conflicts with the established doctrine 

 of the relativity of knowledge. Ife will be remembered that 

 in our first chapter the necessary cooperation of subject 

 and object in every act of cognition was shown to be one of 

 those very facts which enforce the conclusion that all know- 

 ledge is of the Eelative. No competent psychologist would 

 now subscribe to the Lockian opinion that previous to the 

 reception of experiences the mind is like a blank sheet. 

 Physiology has taught us better than that, — has taught us 

 that mind is strictly correlated with a complex nervous sys- 

 tem, which, according to minute peculiarities of organization, 

 modifies the experiences resulting from its intercourse with 

 environing agencies. We, therefore, recognize as fully as 

 Leibnitz, that the subject actively cooperates with the object 

 in each act of consciousness. And we insist that, for that 

 very reason, our knowledge, being the product of subjective 



