apart from its determinations.

The understanding

makes only a regressive movement; it traces up the determinations to the determiner on which they depend, and finds it to be a negative unity, instead of an originating cause or determiner.

§ 155. The understanding arrives at a negative unity, which, if properly comprehended, is an original, spontaneous cause- -a causa sui. This is self-activity. The analysis of self-activity finds self as subject and self as object; self as determiner and self as determined. The negative unity is the end of analysis, and as causa sui it is the beginning of synthesis; for a self-activity determines itself and produces distinctions within itself. It externalizes or makes itself objective. The understanding is a process of analysis, while reason begins with synthesis. The understanding explains by neglecting or annulling the determinations of the world of experience, while the reason explains by showing the objectivating of the determinations of the Absolute Self. All is a process of revelation of the divine.

§ 156. Memory and concept-forming activity convert the results of sense-perception into general terms. Their presupposition is that every object is one of a class that the object-making process has made, or will make, or might make. The understanding devotes its

attention to the discovery of the concrete terms in which these generic processes are expressed. While the concept-forming activity merely asserts the existence of such generic process as the explanation of the object without examining what it is, persistently affirming each object to belong to a class and to be only one specimen out of many similar objects produced by the objective causal process, the understanding, on the other hand, ascertains the particulars and mode of action of the object-forming processes of the world. It ascertains the warp and the woof of human experience. In finding the relations which each object has to every other, it learns the forms of production, and becomes a real knowing of the energies that produce the classes that language expresses and memory retains.

The child asks for the name of each new object. To the superficial observer he seems to have a superstitious reverence for mere names; for he seems to be perfectly satisfied when he learns the name. But to the psychologist the name-learning process has significance as the manifestation of the concept-forming stage of the mind-the distinctively human stage. These names are empty bags, which will hold all the experience of after-life that will cluster round the class of objects named. The name will give unity to that thread of experience and observation. "What is this?" Answer, An acorn. The word acorn will tie together, or hold like a bag or a pigeon-hole, all the perceptions and reflections that relate to the genesis of oak trees, their doings and relations to the rest of the

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world. Hence language is the basis of memory properly so called, for it aids memory by giving it the inestimable gift of classification. It enables it to divide and conquer. Memory aided by language can re-enforce its recollection by the causal insight added to each object-viz., that it is the result of a process that has made it, and is one of a class having the same characteristics because made by the same method of action. It can deduce from the cause or process, as well as recall its sense-impressions.

§ 157. The understanding in both its forms (common sense and reflection) presupposes the concept stage already attained. Each object is one of a class. Common sense has a firm conviction that each object is an independent whole, because it unconsciously adds to the object its universal process; for that addition does make it whole, but a whole as species though not as particular sense-object. The seeing of the particular in its process or its universal makes it an individual, and the thought that thinks this is common sense. But reflection follows next, and necessarily; for the activity of the mind, which sets up each object as a class or a cycle of objects, will begin to analyze and discover the relations of the object to its environment—not merely its environment in space, but in time-its antecedents and consequents its origin and its destiny; how it has proceeded from the object-making cause, and where it will vanish in other stages of the causal process. The

understanding, therefore, in both its phases depends on language, and language is the product of the phantasy in its several shapes of recollection, memory, and imagination joined to the concept-forming activity.

Sense-ideas through which common sense looks upon the world as a world of independent objects do not cognize the world truly. The next step, abstract ideas, cognizes the world as a process of forces, and “things” are seen to be mere temporary equilibria in the interaction of forces; "each thing is a bundle of forces." But the concrete idea of the persistent force sees a deeper and more permanent reality underlying particular forces. It is one ultimate force. In it all multiplicity of existences has vanished, and yet it is the source of all particular existence. This view of the world, on the standpoint of concrete idea, is pantheistic. It makes out a one supreme principle which originates and destroys all particular existences, all finite beings. We have already intimated above that it is the standpoint of Orientalism, or of the Asiatic thought. Buddhism and Brahmanism have reached it, and not transcended it. It is a necessary stage of unfolding in the mind, just as much as the standpoint of the first stage of the understanding, which regards the world as composed of a multiplicity of independent things; or the standpoint of the second stage of the understanding, that of reflection, which looks upon the world as a collection of relative existences in a state of process.

§ 158. The final standpoint of the intellect is that in which it perceives the highest principle to be a selfdetermining or self-active Being, self-conscious, and creator of a world which manifests him. A logical investigation of the principle of "persistent force"

would prove that this principle of Personal Being is presupposed as its true form. Since the "persistent force" is the sole and ultimate reality, it originates all other reality only by self-activity, and thus is selfdetermined. But such a persistent force is possible only in the form of personality. Self-determination implies self-consciousness and personality as the true form of its existence.

These four forms of thinking, which we have arbitrarily called sensuous, abstract, concrete, and absolute ideas, correspond to four views of the world: (1) As a congeries of independent things; (2) as a play of forces; (3) as the evanescent appearance of a negative essential power; (4) as the creation of a Personal Creator, who makes it the theatre of the development of conscious beings in his image. Each step upward arrives at a more adequate idea of the true reality. Force is more real than thing; persistent force than particular forces; Absolute Person is more real than the force or forces which he creates. The fourth stage we name Reason; the others belong to the understanding. This final form of thinking is the only form which is consistent with a true theory of education. Each individual should ascend by education into participation-conscious participation-in the life of the species. Institutions—family, society, state, Church—all are instrumentalities by which the humble individual may avail himself of the help of the race, and live over in himself its life. The highest stage of thinking is the stage of insight. It sees the world as explained by the principle of Absolute Person. It finds the world of institutions a world in harmony with such a principle.