ugh with an excessive approximation to Kant. In this
field he advances many acute and suggestive thoughts, as the deduction
which reappears in Lotze, that the actually existent world of figure and
motion cognized by thought, though the real world, is poorer than the
wonderful world of motley sensuous appearance conjured forth in our minds
on the occasion of the former, that the latter is the more beautiful and
more worthy of a divine author. Further, the conviction, also held by
Lotze, that the fundamental activities of the mind cannot be defined, but
only known through inner experience or immediate consciousness (he
who loves, knows what love is; it is a _per conscientiam et intimam
experientiam notissima res_); the praiseworthy attempt to give a systematic
arrangement, according to their derivation from one another, to the innate
mathematical concepts, which Descartes had simply co-ordinated (the concept
of surface is gained from the concept of body by abstracting from the third
dimension, thickness--the act of thus abstracting from certain parts of
the content of thought, Geulincx terms _consideratio_ in contrast to
_cogitatio_, which includes the whole content); and, finally, the still
more important inquiry, whether it is possible for us to reach a knowledge
of things independently of the forms of the understanding, as in pure
thought we strip off the fetters of sense. The possibility of this is
denied; there is no higher faculty of knowledge to act as judge over the
understanding, as the latter over the sensibility, and even the wisest
man cannot free himself from the forms of thought (categories, _modi
cogitandi_). And yet the discussion of the question is not useless: the
reason should examine into the unknowable as well as the knowable; it is
only in this way that we learn that it is unknowable. As the highest forms
of thought Geulincx names subject (the empty concept of an existent, _ens_
or _quod est_) and predicate _(modus entis_), and derives them from two
fundamental activities of the mind, a combining function _(simulsumtio,
totatio_) and an abstracting function (one which removes the _nota
subjecti_). Substance and accident, substantive and adjective, are
expressions for subjective processes of thought and hence do not hold
of things in themselves. With reference to the importance, nay, to the
indispensability, of linguistic signs in the use of the understanding, the
science of the forms of thought is brief