550 INTELLECTUAL SYMBOLISM. 
tention in any of these limiting particulars, may be the source of error. The category of 
Spontaneity, cognizing its own action, is therefore Limitation. 
354. Rationality, comparing the receptive affirmation and the spontaneous limitation, 
can alone set impassable limits, and give us the category of Negation. The child, in be- 
ginning to gratify his desire for knowledge, accepts everything that is told him with im- 
plicit faith. It is only after Rationality has acquired considerable development, that he 
begins to doubt or deny. 
355. Spontaneity, therefore, in the three conditions of intelligence, gives us the three 
categories of Quality,—Affirmation, Limitation, and Negation; all of which refer, through 
the spontaneous category of Modality, to the science of Reality, or Existence, and particu- 
larly to Natural Science. 
356. Rationality is not only the highest of our faculties, but it is the latest developed, 
and the most rarely found in full development. It holds the same rank in the human 
mind that man himself occupies in the created world, and as reasoning beings are superior 
to beings of impulse and instinct, so is the reasoning man, the man who seeks and loves 
the true and perfect, superior to the man of appetite and passion. 
357. A thorough investigation of Rationality is therefore, as we might naturally suppose, 
and as we shall find in the pursuit of our inquiries, attended with greater difficulties than 
the study of Motivity or Spontaneity. Some of these difficulties are indeed insurmount- 
able by finite and progressive beings, for from its very nature, reason requires the perfect 
and infinite for its full satisfaction. So long, therefore, as there is any leaven of imperfec- 
tion in us, we can only approximate nearer and nearer to its ends, without ever attaining 
them. 
308. The first step in our progress, the investigation of the rational categories, is, how- 
ever, comparatively easy, guided as we may be by the results we have already obtained. 
We need only inquire (since the objective becomes ideally represented to us only through 
Relation), What are Motivity, Spontaneity, and Rationality, and what relations do they 
severally indicate ? 
359. Motivity, as we have seen, refers merely to phenomena, from which we obtain ideas 
of the accidental qualities of bodies. Rationality asserts the necessity of some reality in 
which those qualities inhere. The category of Motivity in Rationality is, therefore, that 
of Inherence and Subsistence, or Substance and Accident. 
360. Spontaneity is the faculty of action. Rationality assigns the negative limit to ac- 
tion, which is reaction. ‘The relation of the two gives us the category of Spontaneity in 
Rationality, which is that of Action and Reaction. 
361. Rationality, as will be more evident hereafter, is the faculty of Cause. The corre- 
lative of cause is effect. The same relation is easily discovered by comparing the two 
