Facts are, or ought to be, only the generators of ideas. Facts in themselves are utterly worthless; it is in their associations, in their consequences, their bearings on each other; it is as they support or refute systems, theories and other mind-born facts, that they are of value. Now, it is only by the action of mind upon them that they have associations, consequences, &c. Without mind, facts must for ever remain units; even though added together, _ad infinitum_, they have no natural co-unity, no cohesion, no affinity for each other. A thousand facts added together are still but a thousand units, unless mind has cohered them into a system. This done, you clearly have the thousand facts still, but you have _also_ something infinitely more valuable, you have a mind-born fact, a deduction, a system, hypothesis, theory, axiom, or whatever you please to call it. Cordially as we hate coining new words, we still more cordially hate the German fashion of hooking together two vernacular words and calling the junction an addition to the language. But we are compelled, in order to save circumlocution, to coin a word to express those facts which spring from Mind, whether, as in moral philosophy, purely metaphysical, or as in natural philosophy, generated by Mind from Matter, by Reason from Experience. Such facts we would beg to call noögenisms (νοος, _mens_, _cogitatio_, and γενος, _natus_, _progenies_); therein including all mental offsprings or deductions, whether called hypotheses, theories, systems, sciences, axioms, aphorisms, &c. Noögenisms, therefore, are those facts which mind generates from other facts without annihilating the latter; hence it is said that, metaphysically, two and two make five. Thus, mind, contemplating the physical facts of the super-position of strata, deduces from and adds to them this metaphysical fact or noögenism;—Strata were deposited successively. Herein appears too an essential difference between Mind and Matter. If diverse substances, having a natural affinity, be amalgamated, a new substance is obtained, but the elements are lost. Of hydrogen and oxygen water may be made, but the gases are forthwith lost in the fluid; the procedure may be reversed and the water be converted into gases, but the water has disappeared. This is not so with mind and noögenisms; for however closely, by a mental synthesis, divers facts may be united into a new fact or noögenism, the latter is obtained without losing the former or elementary facts, which remain as Knowledge, elements of Wisdom, to support the noögenism or create others.