BASIS OF ONTOLOGY. 589 
CHAPTER IX. 
BASIS OF ONTOLOGY. 
272. In extending our inquiries beyond the mind and its capacities, to the unthinking 
objective, our conclusions must rest entirely upon faith. We know what takes place in 
our own minds, and we know how we are affected by external bodies, but what is the 
condition of those bodies, or how truly that condition is represented by our conceptions, 
it is impossible for us to know. 
273. If the subjective is limited to the sphere of human consciousness, we can judge 
of the objective-objective relation, or of the objective sides of the objective-subjective and 
the subjective-objective relations, only by an assumed analogy between our cognition of 
phenomena and their supposed cause. . 
274. Our faith in such an analogy may be strengthened by the rational conviction that 
the highest unity, in which both the knowing and the knowable are joined, must be a Su- 
preme Intelligence ;* that the source of all things is therefore an Infinite Omniscient 
Subjective,—and that, so far as our finite subjective resembles the Infinite, our subjective 
views of the objective will resemble the higher subjective reality of the objective, as it is 
perceived by the Infinite Intelligence. 
275. Since the days of Wolff, the term Ontotogy has generally been applied to the 
science of Being,t—the science of the purely objective. Inasmuch as the realm of On- 
tology lies entirely outside of all possible experience, its data, like the primary cognitions 
that furnish the conditions of experience and of reason, transcend the sphere of reason, 
and, therefore, belong to what has been called, since the days of Kant, TRANSCENDENTAL 
PHILOSOPHY. 
276. The reasons that have been given for adopting a trichotomy in the investigation 
of mental phenomena, are equally valid for a primary fundamental analysis of the objec- 
tive, that is based upon mental analogy. ‘The whole sphere of Being, above Conscious- 
ness, can hardly be well studied in any other way than in its relations to the triform Con- 
sciousness; but after reaching the level of Consciousness, the subsequent divisions are 
within the possible relations of experience, and “the same subject may admit, and even 
* «¢ Matter does not moye matter otherwise than as a medium, but Mind does move it.” Tuylor: World of 
Mind, p. 35. 
} See Fleming, p. 162. 
VoL. x1I.—68 
