Page:On the Fourfold Root, and On the Will in Nature.djvu/61

 have no connection between conceptions and judgments, but between sides and angles. The equality of the angles is not the direct, but the indirect reason, by which we know the equality of the sides; for it is the reason why a thing is such as it is (in this case, that the sides are equal) : the angles being equal, the sides must therefore be equal. Here we have a necessary connection between angles and sides, not a direct, necessary connection between two judgments.—Or again, if I ask why infecta facta, but never facta infecta fieri possunt, consequently why the past is absolutely irrevocable, the future inevitable, even this does not admit of purely logical proof by means of mere abstract conceptions, nor does it belong either to causality, which only rules occurrences within Time, not Time itself. The present hour hurled the preceding one into the bottomless pit of the past, not through causality, but immediately, through its mere existence, which existence was nevertheless inevitable. It is impossible to make this comprehensible or even clearer by means of mere conceptions; we recognise it, on the contrary, quite directly and instinctively, just as we recognize the difference between right and left and all that depends upon it : for instance, that our left glove will not fit our right hand, &c. &c.

Now, as all those cases in which the principle of sufficient reason finds its application cannot therefore be reduced to logical reason and consequence and to cause and effect, the law of specification cannot have been sufficiently attended to in this classification. The law of homogeneity, however, obliges us to assume, that these cases cannot differ to infinity, but that they may be reduced to certain species. Now, before attempting this classification, it will be necessary to determine what is peculiar to the principle of sufficient reason in all cases, as its special characteristic; because the conception of the genus must always be determined before the conception of the species.