confrontation with fact, in which, in virtue of the rational principle
which is the final cause of the phenomenal order, intelligence will find
satisfaction. On the other we have a stage at which the rational but as
yet not reasoned concepts developed in the medium of the psychological
mechanism are subjected to processes of reflective comparison and
analysis, and, with some modification, maintained against challenge,
till at length the ultimate universals emerge, which rational insight
can posit as certain, and the whole hierarchy of concepts from the
"first" universals to [Greek: ta amerê] are intuited in a coherent
system. Aristotle's terminology is highly technical, but, as has often
been observed, not therefore clear. Here two words at least are
ambiguous, "principle" and "induction." By the first he means any
starting-point, "that from which the matter in question is primarily to
be known,"[70] particular facts therefore, premises, and what not. What
then is meant by principles when we ask in the closing chapter of his
logic how they become known? The data of sense are clearly not the
principles in question here. The premises of scientific syllogisms may
equally be dismissed. Where they are not derivative they clearly are
definitions or immediate transcripts from definitions. There remain,
then, primary definitions and the postulates of their realization, and
the axioms or common principles, "which he must needs have who is to
reach any knowledge."[71] In the case of the former, special each to its
own science, Aristotle may be thought to hold that they are the product
of the psychological mechanism, but are ascertained only when they have
faced the fire of a critical dialectic and have been accepted from the
point of view of the integral rationality of the system of concepts.
Axioms, on the other hand, in which the sciences interconnect[72]
through the employment of them in a parity of relation, seem to be
implicit indeed in the psychological mechanism, but to come to a kind of
explicitness in the first reflective reaction upon it, and without
reference to any particular content of it. They are not to be used as
premises but as immanent laws of thought, save only when an inference
from true or admitted premises and correct in form is challenged. The
challenge must be countered in a _reductio ad impossibile_ in which the
dilemma is put. Either this conclusion or the denial of rationality.
Even these principles, however, may get a greater explicitness by
dialectical treatment.[73] The relation, then, of the two orders of
principle to the psychological mechanism is different. The kind of
warrant that intelligence can give to specific principles falls short of
infallibility. Celestial physics, with its pure forms and void of all
matter save extension, is not such an exemplary science after all.
Rationality is continuous throughout. A [Greek: logos] emerges with some
beings in direct sequence upon the persistence of impressions.[74] Sense
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