other words about them, or ever
giving me any more exception against them. And this was the issue of
my third attempt for union with the Independents.

Dr. Owen was a man of no ordinary intellect. It would be interesting to
have his conduct in this point, seemingly so strange, in some measure
explained: The words "those mathematics" look like an innuendo, that
Baxter's scheme of union, by which all the parties opposed to the
Prelatic Church were to form a rival Church, was, like the mathematics,
true indeed, but true only in the idea, that is, abstracted from the
subject matter. Still there appears a very chilling want of
open-heartedness on the part of Owen, produced perhaps by the somewhat
overly and certainly most ungracious resentments of Baxter. It was odd
at least to propose concord in the tone and on the alleged ground of an
old grudge.

Ib.

I have been twenty-six years convinced that dichotomizing will not do
it, but that the divine Trinity in Unity hath expressed itself in the
whole frame of nature and morality * * *. But he, Mr. George Lawson,
had not hit on the true method of the 'vestigia Trinitatis', &c.

Among Baxter's philosophical merits, we ought not to overlook, that the
substitution of Trichotomy for the old and still general plan of
Dichotomy in the method and disposition of Logic, which forms so
prominent and substantial an excellence in Kant's Critique of the Pure
Reason, of the Judgment, and the rest of his works, belongs originally
to Richard Baxter, a century before Kant;--and this not as a hint, but
as a fully evolved and systematically applied principle. Nay, more than
this:--Baxter grounded it on an absolute idea presupposed in all
intelligential acts: whereas Kant takes it only as a fact in which he
seems to anticipate or suspect some yet deeper truth latent, and
hereafter to be discovered.

On recollection, however, I am disposed to consider 'this' alone as
Baxter's peculiar claim, I have not indeed any distinct memory of
Giordano Bruno's 'Logice Venatrix Veritatis'; but doubtless the
principle of Trichotomy is necessarily involved in the Polar Logic,
which again is the same with the Pythagorean 'Tetractys', that is, the
eternal fountain or source of nature; and this being sacred to
contemplations of identity, and prior in order of thought to all
division, is so far from interfering with Trichotomy as the universal
form of division (more correctly of distinctive distri