If absolute truths are beyond man who perceives them, once more, where are they, then? A peripatetic would respond--In nature. Is it, in fact, necessary to seek for them any other subject than the beings themselves which they govern? What are the laws of nature, except certain properties which our mind disengages from the beings and phenomena in which they are met, in order to consider them apart? Mathematical principles are nothing more. For example, the axiom thus expressed--The whole is greater than any of its parts, is true of any whole and part whatever. The principle of contradiction, considered in its logical title, as the condition of all our judgments, of all our reasonings, constitutes a part of the essence of all being, and no being can exist without containing it. The universal exists, says Aristotle, but it does not exist apart from particular beings.[44] This theory which considers universals as having their basis in things, is a progress towards the pure conceptualism which we have in the beginning indicated and shunned. Aristotle is much more of a realist than Abelard and Kant. He is quite right in maintaining that universals are in particular things, for particular things could not be without universals; universals give to them their fixity, even for a day, and their unity. But from the fact that universals are in particular beings, is it necessary to conclude that they, wholly and exclusively, reside there, and that they have no other reality than that of the objects to which they are applied? It is the same with principles of which universals are the constitutive elements. It is, it is true, in the particular fact, of a particular cause producing a particular event, that is given us the universal principle of causality; but this principle is much more extensive than the facts, for it is applied, not only to this fact, but to a thousand others. The particular fact contains the principle, but it does not wholly contain it, and, far from giving the basis of the principle, it is based upon it. As much may be said of other principles. Perhaps it will be replied that, if a principle is certainly more extensive than such a fact, or such a being, it is not more extensive than all facts and all beings, and that nature, considered as a whole, can explain that which each particular being does not explain. But nature, in its totality, is still only a finite and contingent thing, whilst the principles to be explained have a necessary and infinite bearing. The idea of the infinite can come neither from any particular being, nor from the whole of beings. Entire nature will not furnish us the idea of perfection, for all the beings of nature are imperfect. Absolute principles govern, then, all facts and all beings, they do not spring from them.