take place in connection with experiential cognition, and that they are not properly inferences, but presentational perceptions of things as in logical relations. Or we may say that in complete presentational perception intuition and experience unite. Thus, in the very act of perceiving some event as resulting from some cause, we also perceive it to result necessarily. We see that it could not take place without the cause, and that, with the cause, it could not fail to take place. In such a cognition we would not infer the event from the cause, but perceive it as in necessary relation to the cause.

In like manner mathematical intuitions may be presentational. We may see three equal bodies and their equality, and at the same time perceive the necessity that two of them, being respectively equal to the third, must be equal to one another.

But it is true that the great use and value of intuitive judgment are realized in connection with inference. As the vital element in inference, intuition enables one to perceive and know things which he does not know already, and which he cannot know in any other way. The fitness of intuition for this use, more than any other characteristic, is the ground of its philosophical importance and of its distinction from experience.

While this latter mode of perception is wholly presentational, the intuitive judgment may assume three forms. First, it also may be presentational, the perception of necessary relations between things visibly present. Secondly, it may be an actualistic inference, in which, from some seen antecedent, we infer a real consequent as necessarily connected with it. And, thirdly, it may be an hypothetical inference in which we merely suppose an antecedent, and thereupon infer a consequent as hypothetically necessary. In these two latter modes of judgment, intuition exhibits that peculiar power whereby it produces conviction on the mere presentation of a proposition, and in the absence of the object asserted to exist.

individual,

3. When we examine any spontaneous intuition or Singular, or self-evident belief, as, for example, that some inand general, dividual change which we observe must proceed from or principiated, intui- a cause; or that some particular change similar to tions distin- another must proceed from a cause similar to that guished. of the other; or that two individual things (bodies, weights, forces, lines, surfaces, solids, or any kind of quantities), being each equal to a third, are equal to each other, we find that the judgment does not depend on the whole nature of the things observed and judged about, but only on certain elements of their nature, which we perceive as the fundamenta of the necessary relations. We ground our judgment

on the perception that certain objects are quantities, and have relations and relata pertaining to them as such; or on the perception that they are events, and have the relations and relata belonging to them as such; or that they are substances, or powers, or spaces, or times, or relations of some kind, as identity or diversity, or similarity or dissimilarity, and have the relations and relata connected with them as such. Our conclusion is logically independent of any more specific (or specificative) features which may accompany these radical characteristics.

Such being the case, it is both possible and natural for thinking men to withdraw their attention from those elements in objects which are not necessary conditions of their judgment, and to concentrate their thought upon those which are. In this way abstract singular judgments are formed, presenting that which is self-evident simply as having the nature which makes it selfevident; and from these, by an application of the homologic principle, general judgments are derived, which express fundamental laws, and which may be used as radical rules of inference.

For example, perceiving or thinking about any individual event simply as such, we can immediately say that it must have a cause, and that, too, a cause corresponding to its own nature, and which, if repeated, will produce a similar effect. Or should we add together three equal amounts of some particular substance, as sugar or salt or water or wine, on two or more occasions, we might, thinking of them only as quantities, say that the sum in each instance is equal to that in each of the other instances. Then, immediately consequent upon such individual judgments, we have the general "principles," that there is no effect without a cause, that like effects have like causes, and that if equals be added to equals, the sums will be equal. How far and 4. Every such general judgment sets forth that in what sense which is necessarily true in any particular instance whatever, in which the antecedent of the judgment are ontologi- may exist. Such a judgment, therefore, may be regarded as expressing an universal law of being. It states what absolutely must be true of some subject provided that subject exist. It asserts that anywhere, or at any time, or in any system of being, in which that subject may be found, that law must prevail. Because these generalized intuitions would be true under any possible system, they may be distinguished as ontological judgments, and may be said to express ontological laws.

intuitive and

intuitional judgments

cal.

This character may be given to them on the further ground that they would be necessarily employed by rational beings,

under any system of existence, as really applicable to the forms of entity composing it. In other words, our abstract intuitive judgments are not only such as would be true, if applicable, under any system of being, but are such also as must be applicable. For this reason, therefore, as connected with the we may

very existence of things, in case things exist at all, call them ontological judgments, and say that they indicate ontological laws.

Those concrete intuitions in which objects are regarded in their whole nature, and without rejection of those elements on which the necessary perception does not depend, might also be called ontological, as containing and embodying the necessary judgment; and they sometimes do receive this name. They are ontological, however, not as to their whole nature, but only in an inferior and secondary sense, and as including judgments which more properly deserve the designation.

Cosmological judgments jefined, as being con

crete intui

As contrasted with the abstract or general judgment, the concrete intuition might be distinguished as cosmological; and so our intuitions might be divided into two kinds, the ontological and the cosmological, these latter having, in addition to the ontological thought and perception which ontological judgments judgments. employ, and which they also employ, modes of conception and of conviction peculiar to themselves.

tions. How related to

Our most noted cosmological judgments relate to the specific operation of natural causes. Let us, for example, take our intuitions respecting the explosion of a percussion cap by the blow of a hammer. Presentationally, we say that that particular blow (with its attending circumstances) was necessarily followed by that particular flash and report. Inferentially, we say that another cap, just like that one, would be exploded by a similar blow. These judgments pertain not to cause and effect in the abstract, but to the hammering and explosion of certain percussion caps.

Evidently, too, the propositions expressing them, when understood as the utterances of intuitional or necessary truth, are self-evident in the sense that they need only to be conceived or stated in order to be believed. Our conviction in each case assumes or starts from our observation and analysis of the actual phenomena. But at the same time these judgments, as setting forth necessary relations, include, and are founded on, modes of perception which do not depend on our knowledge of any instituted order of things, but which employ principles of absolute necessity, and are emphatically ontological. They include the judgments that a change demands a cause;

that the true cause, or a reliable sign of it, is discoverable by what logicians call the method of difference (for the explosion takes place only when the blow is given); and that like causes are conjoined with like effects.

These principles are ontological; and not only does the cosmological judgment involve the assertion of them, as a part of itself, but its whole force, whether as a presentational perception of necessity or as an inference, depends on, and flows from, this assertion.

The only part which experience performs in connection with inferences respecting the actual operations of Nature is to give a knowledge of fact simply as such, and without reference to the logical relations of fact. Thereupon inferential perception, according to ontological principles, taking hold of the facts, and retaining the specific forms of thought furnished by experience, yet without any further aid from presentative perception, can produce the conclusion proper in the case. The judgment that the explosion necessarily follows the blow is something so independently intellectual that it takes place as well on the supposition or remembrance, as on the perception, of the facts; while the judgment that a similar cap will be exploded by a similar blow is a homological inference from the particular intuition already made. So that although cosmological judgments find the specific form of their data and of their conceptions in experience, or the observation of fact, their whole force comes from the apprehension of truths which are evident merely on being stated and independently of our cognition of the actual.

Therefore, as opposed to experiential perception, and as being a mode of necessary and of inferential perception, the cosmological judgment is intuitional, and, in a certain limited sense, ontological.

While our reasonings respecting the operations of specific causes are pre-eminently cosmological, all other inferences, which employ any mode of conception not essential to the ontological principle which they follow, have the same character. Such are mathematical judgments and inferences about natural objects, considered as such and as having their observed peculiarities. The assertion that a pound of feathers is of the same weight as a pound of lead, because they are each equal in weight to a pound of iron, is a cosmological intuition.

Such judgments, yet more evidently than those regarding causational sequence, depend for their strength on the abstract principles which they enclose and embody.

The reliabil

CHAPTER L.

METAPHYSICS, OR ONTOLOGY.

1. THE doctrine of the reliability of our original, or ity of experi- primary, judgments, or perceptions, relates equally to exence and in- periential and to intuitional perceptions. But it is more tuition. comprehensive than that which asserts the reliability of every mode of presentational cognition.

Both our first perceptions of simple fact and our first perceptions of things as necessary, or as contingent, are presentational. They are immediate cognitions respecting our own souls and bodies as being and as being related, as acting and as acted upon, now and here. These presentational judgments, when tested, exhibit every possible mark of trustworthiness. In the first place, they are attended with irresistible conviction; in the second, they are upheld by the universal consent and " common sense of mankind; and, thirdly, they are perfectly con

sistent and coherent with each other.

We have now to add that both memory, the reproduced knowledge of fact, and that intuitive inference in which judgments of necessity and contingency are repeated, while the things asserted to be necessary or possible are not immediately present, have the same marks of reliability as our presentational cognitions.

When we speak of these intuitional judgments being repeated, we do not of course mean that they are repeated from memory, or even that the present has any dependence on a previous perception of truth. We only recognize the fact that the mind can perceive the same connection of things inferentially which it formerly perceived presentationally, in each case acting independently and according to the same law of conviction.

Intuition

Moreover, it is to be noticed that the knowledge thus perceives an gained is that of an objectual necessity. It asserts not objectual ne- merely that we must believe something, but that this somecessity. thing in its own nature must be so, and cannot be otherwise. We not only perceive that equals added to equals are equal, but also that this is so by an absolute and inherent necessity. Were this not so, it would be necessary to explain inferential intuition as simply a sort of memory, or as resulting in some way from reproduced experience.

Some philosophers, resting on such an explanation, deny that we really perceive any absolute necessity, that there are any such judg. ments as those called intuitional. But we appeal from these teachers to the unsophisticated consciousness of mankind.

Others, who cannot deny that an objectual necessity is asserted, say that our intuitions are delusive and unreliable. To prove this, they adduce certain "antinomies," or contradictions, in which they claim that the primary judgments of the mind conflict with each other.