This law of thought lies at the basis of that universal desire of unity, and that universal effort to reduce all our knowledge to unity, which has revealed itself in the history of philosophy, and also of inductive science. "Reason, intellect, νοῦς, concatenating thoughts and objects into system, and tending upward from particular facts to general laws, from general laws to universal principles, is never satisfied in its ascent till it comprehends all laws in a single formula, and consummates all conditional knowledge in the unity of unconditional existence." "The history of philosophy is only the history of this tendency, and philosophers have borne ample testimony to its reality. 'The mind,' says Anaxagoras, 'only knows when it subdues its objects, when it reduces the many to the one.' 'The end of philosophy,' says Plato, 'is the intuition of unity.' 'All knowledge,' say the Platonists, 'is the gathering up into one, and the indivisible apprehension of this unity by the knowing mind.'"[370] [Footnote 370: Hamilton's "Metaphysics," vol. i. pp. 68, 69.] This law has been the guiding principle of the Inductive Sciences, and has led to some of its most important discoveries. The unity which has been attained in physical science is not, however, the absolute unity of a material substratum, but a unity of _Will_ and of _Thought_. The late discovery of the monogenesis, reciprocal convertibility, and indestructibility of all Forces in nature, leads us upward towards the recognition of one Omnipresent and Omnipotent Will, which, like a mighty tide, sweeps through the universe and effects all its changes. The universal prevalence of the same physical laws and numerical relations throughout all space, and of the same archetypal forms and teleology of organs throughout all past time, reveals to us a Unity of Thought which grasps the entire details of the universe in one comprehensive plan.[371] The positive _à priori_ intuitions of reason and the _à posteriori_ inductions of science equally attest _that God is one_. [Footnote 371: We refer with pleasure to the articles of Dr. Winchell, in the North-western Christian Advocate, in which the _à posteriori_ proof of "the Unity of God" is forcibly exhibited, and take occasion to express the hope they will soon be presented to the public in a more permanent form.] 4th. By denying that man has any intuitive cognitions of right and wrong, or any native and original feeling of obligation, Mr. Watson invalidates "the moral argument" for the existence of a Righteous God.