These are examples of the operation of Understanding. It can only reach a synthesis (or conjunction), never a real unity, because it believes in the omnipotence of the abstractions with which it began: but must either carry out one partial principle to its consequences, or allow an alternate and combined force to two opposite principles. Its canon is identity: given something, let us see what follows when we keep the same point always in view, and compare other points with the one which we are supposed to know. Its method is analytic: given a conception in which popular thought supposes itself at home, and let us see all the elements of truth which can be deduced from it. Its statements are abstract and narrow: or, in the words of Anaxagoras, one thing is cut off from another with a hatchet[3]. In its excess it degenerates into dogmatism, whether that dogmatism be theological or naturalistic. The fact is that the Understanding, as this analytic, abstract, and finite action of mind is called,--the thought which holds objective ideas distinct from one another, and from the subjective faculties of thought as a whole,--that this Understanding is, when it claims to be heard and obeyed in science, not sufficiently thorough-going. It begins at a point which is not so isolated as it seems, but is a member of a body of thought: nor is it aware that the whole of this body of thought is in organic, and even more than organic, union. It errs in taking too much for granted: and in not seeing how this given point is the result of a process,--that in it, in any thought or idea, several tendencies or elements converge and are held in union, but with the possibility of working their way into a new independence. In other words, the Understanding requires, as the organon and method of philosophy, to be replaced by the Reason[4],--by infinite thought, concrete, at once analytic and synthetic. How then, it may be asked, can we make the passage from the inadequate to the adequate? To that question the answer may be given that it is our act of arbitrary arrest which halts at the inadequate: that in complete Reason, which is the constituent nature both of us and of things, the Understanding is only a grade which points beyond itself, and therefore presupposes and struggles up to the adequate thought. In other words, it is Reason which creates or lays down for behoof of its own organisation the aims, conditions, and fixed entities,--the objects, by which it is bound and limited in its analytic exercise as understanding. Reason, therefore, is the implicit tendency to correct its own inadequacy: and we have only to check self-will and prejudice so far that the process may be accomplished.