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 CHAPTER XI ALGEBRAIZERS

of the tragedy of religious conflict is due to lack of comprehension of the process of Algebraization

I have pointed out how a question which seemed, on its own level, hopelessly unsolvable, is often solved at once by reference to an order of considerations higher than that involved in the question itself. This is especially the case when a Law of Thought is appealed to, to settle a discussion about things. Laws of things we cannot be said really to know, except in a fumbling and empirical manner; when we have true knowledge, it is because we have discovered the Law of Thought which presided at the Genesis of the Things. I wish to speak in all humility and reverence; but I cannot say less than I mean. We get clues, suggestions of Laws of Thought, by studying things; but whenever we truly know, what we know is a Law of Thought, which we have arrived at by discharging from our observation of particular finite things all that made them finite and particular. The elementary geometrician who first conceived, the idea of the circle caught his suggestion from looking at things whose forms were approximately round; but, as soon as he had discovered the law of roundness within his own mind, he was able to express roundness in a new material, to state it generally (by scratching it on the sand) in a manner which afforded no clue to the objects from which the suggestion had