Page:Philosophical Review Volume 1.djvu/274

258 in time and space. The poet Dante saw how even hell was the creation of this "primal love" (Canto III, 6).

Common sense inventories things; science inventories relations; and philosophy explains both these inventories by the creative energy of the totality, or perfect self-consciousness.

But this ascensio mentis ad Deum is, I have said, an inductive process, a critical regress to the logical condition of all existence. It is thought's description of heaven, earth, and hell, so far as these have come within the magic realm of self-conscious experience. It is the concrete system of the fossilized intelligence of man in all departments of his experience. It is an inductive discovery and unification of the categories through which men know sensations, things, force, laws, self-activity. These types of thought came through empirical experience. Rather they made the experience which reveals them. Each type has embalmed the experience of generations. The experience of primeval man, of Oriental, Jewish, Greek, Roman, and Christian man, is the woof through the struggle to interpret which this warp of thought comes into human consciousness. It is the universal constitutive of all particulars which thought has labored at interpreting. The various names which thought has at various epochs given to this universal ground are called categories. The ultimate one of God, as concrete or Triune Personality, is reached only by thought thinking Christian experience. Philosophy without experience is empty, without progressive experience it is dead. It progresses with experience. Hence it cannot be the same after Christ that it was before Christ. To-day it must give a synopsis of the modern or Christian consciousness. The lowest category or conception of the universal ground was, perhaps, spatially the highest, — i.e. the Vedic Sky. This was an induction. So, too, was the Oriental conception of blank Being or Brahm, as well as the more modern ones of matter, substance, force. Thought tarries dogmatically upon one until new experience shows its inadequacy. Advance is made through new, or newly comprehended, revelation of the First Principle in the web of experience. This implies that the thinking man has lived through