objective factors of our cognitive experience, can scarcely be denied. It is what philosophers in every age have been attempting. There are, however, some distinctions about the nature of which philosophers have never been able to agree, some holding them to be real, others to be only virtual: the former view being indicative of the tendency to emphasize the rôle of cognition as a passive representation of objectively given reality; the latter view being an expression of the opposite tendency to emphasize the active or constitutive or constructive factors whereby cognition assimilates to the mind’s own mode of being the reality given to it in experience. In all cognition there is an assimilation of reality and mind, of object and subject. When certain distinctions are held to be real this consideration is emphasized: that in the cognitive process, as such, it is the mind that is assimilated to the objective reality.(155) When these same distinctions are held to be logical this other consideration is emphasized: that in the cognitive process reality must also be assimilated to mind, must be mentalized so to speak: _Cognitum est in cognoscente secundum modum cognoscentis_: that in this process the mind must often regard what is _one_ reality under _distinct aspects_: and that if we regard these distinct aspects as distinct realities we are violating the principle, _Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem_. Now those philosophers who hold certain distinctions to be virtual, and not real, thereby ascribe to cognitive experience a larger sphere of constitutive or constructive influence than would be allowed to it by advocates of the reality of such distinctions. But by doing so are they to be regarded as calling into question the objective validity of human knowledge? By no means: the fact that the human mind can understand reality only by processes of abstracting, generalizing, comparing, relating, analysing and synthesizing—processes which involve the production of logical entities—in no way vitiates the value of these modes of understanding: it merely indicates that they are less perfect than intuitive modes of understanding which would dispense with such logical entities,—the modes characteristic of pure, angelic intelligences, or the knowledge of the Deity. The objective validity of human cognition is not interfered with either by enlarging or by restricting the domain of the mind’s constitutive activity in forming such logical entities; nor, therefore, by claiming that certain distinctions are real rather than virtual, or _vice versa_. It must be remembered, moreover, that the virtual distinction is not purely logical: it has a foundation in the reality, a “_fundamentum in re_”; and in so far as it has it gives us an insight into the nature of reality.