Page:Immediate Experience and Mediation.djvu/14

 itself there are logical antecedents and logical consequents. And when it is maintained that 'all our knowledge rests in the end on immediate experience', this, it will be said, is the scope and significance of the distinction. Certain terms, within the process of mediation itself, are primary, the logical foundations of all the rest. And, being primary, they neither require, nor admit of, explanation or proof. Thus, there are certain fundamental principles, certain 'Laws of Thought', which are the conditiones sine quibus non of all sound reasoning. And again, within each sphere of inquiry there are certain basal facts, or connexions of facts, on which all other facts and connexions within that sphere depend. Unless we know the first—unless, at least, our reasoning is controlled by an intelligent recognition of their authority—we cannot be sure that we are explaining or demonstrating at all; and unless we also know the second (the basal connexions within the special sphere), we cannot explain or demonstrate any determinate fact or connexion. But if these principles and these basal connexions are known, the knowledge of them must clearly be immediate. They are, in short, primary, self-evident truths, the foundations of all our knowledge. To 'demonstrate' is to derive from indemonstrable, but self-luminous, truths; and the derivation must proceed in accordance with principles themselves self-evident. And to 'explain' is to resolve a complex into inexplicable, but self-explanatory, constituents—to re-state it