is not foreign to it, but one with itself.
The sides and angles of a right angle triangle have certain relations
to one another. The square described on the hypotenuse of such an angle
is equal to the squares described on the other two sides. This may be
demonstrated on a piece of blank paper, or the mind may conceive a right
angle triangle, and prove the proposition without making any marks at
all. The constitutional relations which were in the nature of a right
angle triangle are the same, whether it be drawn on paper or conceived
by the imagination. The relations of the triangle make it intelligible,
because they constitute its truth.
I.
To truth the intellect is related, as is the eye to light, and the ear
to sound. If the eye were destroyed, the sun would not cease to shine.
His light would still come upon hill and plain to feed the flowers and to
disclose their beauty, but without the organ of vision no creature in the
universe would be able to see the things which his light reveals. The ear
does not create sound. Let it be forever sealed, and the Niagaras would
still continue to fall and the thunders to shake the heavens, but they
would not be heard. The intellect does not create truth, but it is the
only faculty with which man is endowed by which he is able to discover it.
It was the error of the idealists that they made the order, laws, and
relations of things as so many principles projected out of the observer’s
own mind into the universe about him. What he seemed to see in things,
were but modifications of his own mental states. The only order things
had was in the observer’s own mind. It was regarded not only as the pivot
upon which the universe turned, but also as the creative principle from
which the universe took form. Apparently this was a great gain to mind,
but it was at the expense of any real world for the mind to contemplate.
It seemed to win a victory for the intelligence absolute and entire,
but it was by shutting it up to its own shadowy abstractions, and
abandoning it in a shoreless and bottomless void to its own vain musings.
The personal pronoun _I_ was extended perpendicularly and horizontally,
till topways and sideways the whole of space and time was filled with
it. No solid earth, no burning sun, no rolling orbs were left. A great,
illimitable, irresponsible ego became the sole occupant of all that is.
This extreme idealism is in direct contrast to the realism of the early
thinkers. They taught that things depended on man neither for their
existence nor their intelligibility. That each thing carried the real
intelligible essence as an ultimate fact in itself. Thought in man was
but the reflection of this intelligible essence in the thing, as the
light in the mirror is but the reflection of the light of the lamp.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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