NECESSARY TRUTHS— EFFECTS OF EXPERIENCE. 677 



pliilosoplij is oulj a way of couceiving nature ho as to 

 arrange its items along some of the more natural lines of 

 cleavage of our mental structure. 



Other natural lines are the moral and festhetic relations. 

 Philosophy is still seeking to conceive things so that these 

 relations also may seem to obtain between them. 



As long as things have not successfully been so con- 

 ceived, the moral and sesthetic relations obtain only between 

 entia rationis, terms in the mind ; and the moral and aesthetic 

 principles remain but postulates, not propositions, with 

 regard to the real world outside. 



There is thus a large body of a priori or intuitively 

 uecessar}^ truths. As a rule, these are trutlis of comparison 

 only, and in the first instance they express relations be- 

 tween merely mental terms. Nature, however, acts as if 

 some of her realities were identical with these mental 

 terms. So far as she does this, we can make a priori propo- 

 sitions concerning natural fact. The aim of both science 

 and philosophy is to make the identifiable terms more 

 numerous. So far it has proved easier to identify nature s 

 things with mental terms of the mechanical than with men- 

 tal terms of the sentimental order. 



The widest postulate of rationality is that the world is 

 rationally intelligible throughout, after the pattern of some 

 ideal system. The whole war of the philosophies is over 

 that point of faith. Some say they can see their way 

 already to the rationality; others that it is hopeless in any 

 other but the mechanical way. To some the very fact that 

 there is a world at all seems irrational. Nonentity would be 

 a more natural thing than existence, for these minds. One 

 philosopher at least says that the relatedness of things to 

 each other is irrational anyhow, and that a world of rela- 

 tions can never be made intelligible.* 



With this I may be assumed to have completed the 

 programme wdiich I announced at the beginning of the chap- 

 ter, so far as the theoretic part of our organic mental struc- 



* " All sich, in seinem eigneii Wese/i, M jedes reale Object mil sich selbst 

 identisch und utibedingt " — that is, the " allgemeinste Einsicht a priori," and 

 the "allgemeinste aus Erfahrung " is 'Alles erkennbare ist bedingt." 

 (A. Spir : Denken uud Wirklichkeit. Compare also Heibart and Hegel.) 



