Let us be content if at the close of this chapter we can affirm still more positively the conclusions of our first. Through a consideration of the a priori knowledge of Time and Space, and their logical priority, as conditions, to the world of experience, we inferred the transcendency of Mind. Upon further investigation, we have now discovered that there are other forms of the Mind more primordial than Space and Time, and more essentially related to its activity; for all the categories of pure thought—Being, Negation, &c.,—are applicable to Space and to Time, and hence more universal than either of them alone; these categories of pure thought, moreover, as before remarked, could never have been derived from experience. Experience is not possible without presupposing these predicates. “They are the tools of intelligence through which it cognizes.” If we hold by this stand-point exclusively, we may say, with Kant, that we furnish the subjective forms in knowing, and for this reason cannot know the “thing in itself.” If these categories are merely subjective—i. e. given in the constitution of the Mind itself—and we do not know what the “thing in itself” may be, yet we can come safely out of all skepticism here by considering the universal nature of these categories or “forms of the mind.” For if Being, Negation and Existence are forms of mind and purely subjective, so that they do not belong to the “thing in itself,” it is evident that such an object cannot _be_ or _exist_, or in any way have validity, either positively or negatively. Thus it is seen from the nature of mind here exhibited, that Mind is the _noumenon_ or “thing in itself” which Philosophy seeks, and thus our third chapter confirms our first. _Note._ The MATERIALISM of the present day holds that thought is a modification of force, correlated with heat, light, electricity, &c., in short, that organization produces ideas. If so, we are placed within a narrow idealism, and can only say of what is held for _truth_: “I am so correlated as to hold this view,—I shall be differently correlated to-morrow, perhaps, and hold another view.” Yet in this very statement the Ego takes the stand-point of universality—it speaks of possibilities—which it could never do, were it merely a correlate. For to hold a possibility is to be able to annul in thought the limits of the real, and hence to elevate itself to the point of universality. But this is _self_-correlation; we have a movement in a circle, and hence self-origination, and hence a spontaneous fountain of force. The Mind, in conceiving of the possible, annuls the real, and thus creates its own motives; its acting according to motives, is thus acting according to its own acts—an obvious circle again.