[Footnote 3: 'A Principle,' says Herbart (_Psychologie als Wissenschaft,_ Einl.) 'should have the double property of having originally a certainty of its own, and of generating other certainty. The way and manner in which the second comes about is the Method.'] CHAPTER XXX. THE LOGIC OF DESCRIPTION: NATURAL REALISM: BEING. The antithesis between thought and being, between idea and actuality, between notion and object, is almost a commonplace of criticism. Between the ideas of the subject and objectivity a great gulf seems to yawn fixed and impassable. Thinkers, like Anselm and Descartes, have (it is asserted) attempted by a trick which cheated themselves to get from the notion to the object. But--as Kant is supposed to have for ever shown--these _decepti deceptores_ are now universally discredited.[1] Yet the same Kant had shown that the 'things' of ordinary experience are only ideas or appearances in consciousness. These latter ideas, however, were verified by the necessity of interdependence in which they stood, as given by sense. From the notions which Anselm and Descartes proposed to invest with objectivity, there was absent the feature of sense-perception. They were not limited and real ideas, but synthetic laws, general and abstract aspects of reality, modes of conception. They were not definite and individualised things, but terms or conditions for all concepts and realities. They were forms,--forms essential to the explication of reality--and never mere parts of reality. With such 'forms' or 'thought-terms,' such abstractions, Logic (_à la mode de Hegel_) has to deal. And in dealing with them it has to counteract this popular distinction (which Kant inclines toward) which sets up an insuperable division between thought and being, between reality and syllogism, between is and is known. Certain of these denominators which thinking employs to describe reality the popular mind wholly identifies with reality. That being is a thought, that force and thing are only modes of conception, sounds to the untrained intellect only a verbal quibble. Things, beings, are there_--out there_, it says: force is 'ultimate reality.' It is perhaps ready to allow that _substances_ are only mental figments: but it is more doubtful about causes, and inclines to assume them to be in outside nature, and to generate a real necessity in things. On the other hand, it has little doubt that concepts and syllogism are only our ways of looking at reality,--the reality of substances and phenomena, with quality and quantity: that 'final cause' is a mere subjective principle of explanation: and that ideas and knowledge are altogether additions superinduced on a real world.