Page:The British Controversialist - 1867.djvu/502

Rh true." "An unreasoned body of philosophy, however true and formal it may be, has no living and essential interdependency of parts on parts, and is therefore useless as a discipline of the mind, and valueless for purposes of tuition." "A system which is reasoned, but not true, has always some value. It creates reason by exercising it. It is employing the proper means to reach truth, although it may fail to reach it." "In strict science, nothing, properly speaking, is intelligible unless it rests on grounds of rigorous demonstration or necessary reason." "A necessary truth or law of reason is a truth or law, the opposite of which is inconceivable, contradictory, nonsensical, impossible; more shortly, it is a truth, in the fixing of which nature has only one alternative, be a positive or negative." "The canon of all philosophy [is]—Affirm nothing except what is enforced by reason as a necessary truth—i.e., a truth, the supposed reversal of which would involve a contradiction; and deny nothing unless its affirmation involves a contradiction—i.e. contradicts some necessity necessary truth or law of reason. Let this rule be adhered to, and all will go well in philosophy. It's important consists not in it's being stated, but it's being practiced. This system starts from a single proposition, which, it is conceived, is an essential axiom of all reason, and one which cannot be denied without running against a contradiction, and "the scheme is rigidly demonstrated throughout; for a philosophy is not entitled to exist, unless it can make good this claim." "In philosophy nothing is left to the discretion of an individual thinker. His whole arrangement, every step which he takes, must be necessitated, not chosen. It must be prescribed and enforced by the object itself not, by his way of viewing it." Hitherto although things which are first in the order of nature are last in the order of knowledge;" we have tried to get to the end without having got to the beginning." "The difficulty is, so to turn round the whole huge machinery as to get its beginning towards us." "What is truth?—this is in itself the last or ultimate; but to us it is always the first or proximate question of philosophy. The immediate answer which moves away this question, and so causes the whole structure to turn on its pivot, is this: Truth is—what it is. Whatever absolutely is—is true. There can be no doubt about that. This answer instantly raises the question, But what is? "What is true being—absolute existence? This branch of the sciences usually and rightly denominated ontology—the science of that which truly is." "Each answer, as it wards off its own question, must always be of such a character as to bring round a new question into view;" hence "the ontological question instantly brings before us a new question, or rather a new section of questions—this, What is known, and what is knowing?" "This division explores and explains the laws both of knowing and of the known—in other words, the conditions of all the conceivable; laying out the necessary laws as laws of all knowing and all thinking, and the contingent laws as the laws of our knowing and our thinking. This section of the science is properly termed the epistemology—the doctrine or theory of knowing." Thereafter, "we must examine and fix what ignorance is—what we are and can be ignorant of. And thus we are thrown upon an entirely new research, constituting and intermediate section of philosophy, which we term the agnoiology, or theory of ignorance." "In solving the problem, What is? we shall have resolved definitively the ultimate or last question of all philosophy, What is truth?" What is knowledge? must mean one of two things. It must mean either, 1st, what is knowledge in