468 INTELLECTUAL SYMBOLISM. 
8. REVELATION is knowledge communicated in any manner by the Deity to his crea- 
tures. It is either direct or mediate. 
9. Direct revelation is knowledge acquired without the aid of human reasoning, or the 
intervention of any human intelligence except our own. 
10. Mediate revelation is knowledge which was originally acquired by direct revela- 
tion, and transmitted either by oral instruction, or by written record. 
11. Belief, knowledge, faith, revelation, all imply thought and intelligence. The capa- 
city of mind fixes the limits of knowledge. 
12. All knowledge necessarily implies a dual existence, or an existence in two rela- 
tions,* the existence of the knowing, and of the knowable. 
13. From the dual or multiple, the mind naturally desires to ascend to the single or 
general, from the dependent variety to the independent, self-existent unity, which 
embraces and reconciles the plural or diverse. 
14, That which knows, and that which is knowable, can only be united in a self-know- 
ing intelligence, The highest conceivable unity is therefore a self-sufficient or ‘‘ Abso- 
lute,” self-conscious Being,—the Source or Originator of all actual as well as of all possible 
existence. Any other supposable highest intelligible ‘or conceivable unity, must either be 
a unity of the knowing but unknowable, or of the knowable but unknowing, and therefore 
one of the forms of the highest duality, but by no means the all-embracing unity.t 
15. Descartes, in his celebrated dictum, “ Cogito Ergo Sum,” was the first philosopher 
who clearly stated the fact, that consciousness necessarily involves the existence of the 
conscious being, and that all our knowledge must be based upon our personal conscious- 
ness. ‘The same truth was more faintly shadowed forth in the “know thyself” of the 
Greek schools, but Descartes gave to the idea a clearness, simplicity, and fecundity of 
expression, that have revolutionized all metaphysical investigations. 
* (Tf we appeal to consciousness, consciousness gives, even in the last analysis, in the unity of knowledge, a 
duality of existence.’ Hamilton, Discussions, p. 66. ‘The necessary condition of intelligence is consciousness, 
that is, difference.” Cousin, Hist. of Mod. Phil., Vol. I, p. 88. 
+ We are apt to imagine, in the progress of philosophical investigations, that we discover a number of. neces- 
sary but independent unities or realities, such as space, time, position, &c.; but a searching analysis will demon- 
strate that they are all merely forms of the knowable, standing in relation to our capacities of knowing, and that 
whatever necessity we may discover for their existence, is evidence of the necessary existence of a still higher 
unity. 
If the essentiality and permanence of this duality, as well as its dependence on “the necessary condition of 
intelligence,” is fully appreciated, Mahan’s forcible statement of one of the strongest arguments in favor of im- 
mortality (p. 435), will seem almost axiomatic. “At death, not a particle of the physical organization, with which 
the soul is here connected, perishes. How unreasonable and absurd the supposition, that the soul, for whieh all 
else was made, is the only reality that then ceases to be.” 
