The lawyer’s rule excludes not only faith, but knowledge of every sort and degree; for all knowledge is assent, and in the simplest fact of knowledge the intellectual assent is given on authority or evidence extrinsic to the person, though intrinsic in the object. Knowledge is either intuitive or discursive. In intuitive knowledge, the evidence or motive of the intellectual assent is intrinsic in the object, but extrinsic to the assenting mind. The immediate presence of the object motives or authorizes the assent, and the mind has simply the power or faculty of apprehending the object, or judging that it is, when presented; for, without the object affirming its presence to the mind, there can be no fact of knowledge or intellectual assent. In discursive knowledge the authority or evidence, as in intuitive knowledge, is intrinsic in the object, but it is implicit, and can be placed in immediate relation with the intellectual faculty only by discursion--a process of reasoning or demonstration. But demonstration does not motive the assent; it only removes the _prohibentia_, or renders explicit what is implicit, for nothing can be asserted in the 148 conclusion not already implicitly asserted in the premises; yet the assent is by virtue of the evidence or authority intrinsic in the object, as in intuition. All this means that we know objects because they are and are placed in relation with our cognitive faculty, not that they are because we know them, or because the mind places them, or makes them its object. If the lawyer’s rule, that authority is not in the object but in the mind or person, were true, there could be no fact of knowledge, either intuitive or discursive, because the mind cannot know where there is nothing to be known.