the objects. The senses can do no more than
transmit the external in its actual forms, leaving the images in the
mind exactly as they found them; whereas the intuitive power rejects,
or assimilates, indefinitely, until they are resolved into the proper
perfect form. Now the power which prescribes that form must, of
necessity, be antecedent to the presentation of the objects which it
thus assimilates, as it could not else give consistence and unity to
what was before separate or fragmentary. And every one who has
ever realized an idea of the class in which alone we compare the
assimilants with the ideal form, be he poet, painter, or philosopher,
well knows the wide difference between the materials and their result.
When an idea is thus realized and made objective, it affirms its own
truth, nor can any process of the understanding shake its foundation;
nay, it is to the mind an essential, imperative truth, then emerging,
as it were, from the dark potential into the light of reality.

If this be so, the inference is plain, that the relation between the
actual and the ideal is one of necessity, and therefore, also, is the
predetermined correspondence between the prescribed form of an
idea and its assimilant; for how otherwise could the former become
recipient of that which was repugnant or indifferent, when the
presence of the latter constitutes the very condition by which it is
manifested, or can be known to exist? By actual, here, we do not mean
the exclusively physical, but whatever, in the strictest sense, can be
called an _object_, as forming the opposite to a mere subject of
the mind.

It would appear, then, that what we call ourself must have a
_dual_ reality, that is, in the mind and in the senses, since
neither _alone_ could possibly explain the phenomena of the
other; consequently, in the existence of either we have clearly
implied the reality of both. And hence must follow the still more
important truth, that, in the _conscious presence_ of any
_spiritual_ idea, we have the surest proof of a spiritual object;
nor is this the less certain, though we perceive not the assimilant.
Nay, a spiritual assimilant cannot be perceived, but, to use the words
of St. Paul, is "spiritually discerned," that is, by a sense, so to
speak, of our own spirit. But to illustrate by example: we could not,
for instance, have the ideas of good and evil without their objective
realities, nor of right and wrong, in any intelligible form,