ble of division into integral
parts, illimitable, and, as _rationally_ known by us, an absolute unity.
The cognition of limited extension, which is the subject of quantitative
measurement, involves the conception of unlimited space, which is the
negation of all plurality and complexity of parts. And so the cognition
of a phenomenal universe in which we see only difference, plurality, and
change, implies the existence of a Being who is absolutely unchangeable,
identical, and one.

This law of thought lies at the basis of that universal desire of unity,
and that universal effort to reduce all our knowledge to unity, which
has revealed itself in the history of philosophy, and also of inductive
science. "Reason, intellect, nous, concatenating thoughts and objects
into system, and tending upward from particular facts to general laws,
from general laws to universal principles, is never satisfied in its
ascent till it comprehends all laws in a single formula, and consummates
all conditional knowledge in the unity of unconditional existence." "The
history of philosophy is only the history of this tendency, and
philosophers have borne ample testimony to its reality. 'The mind,' says
Anaxagoras, 'only knows when it subdues its objects, when it reduces the
many to the one.' 'The end of philosophy,' says Plato, 'is the intuition
of unity.' 'All knowledge,' say the Platonists, 'is the gathering up
into one, and the indivisible apprehension of this unity by the knowing
mind.'"[370]

[Footnote 370: Hamilton's "Metaphysics," vol. i. pp. 68, 69.]

This law has been the guiding principle of the Inductive Sciences, and
has led to some of its most important discoveries. The unity which has
been attained in physical science is not, however, the absolute unity of
a material substratum, but a unity of _Will_ and of _Thought_. The late
discovery of the monogenesis, reciprocal convertibility, and
indestructibility of all Forces in nature, leads us upward towards the
recognition of one Omnipresent and Omnipotent Will, which, like a mighty
tide, sweeps through the universe and effects all its changes. The
universal prevalence of the same physical laws and numerical relations
throughout all space, and of the same archetypal forms and teleology of
organs throughout all past time, reveals to us a Unity of Thought which
grasps the entire details of the universe in one comprehensive
plan.[371] The positive _a priori_ intuitions of reason and the _a