and
desires" as though he were "concerned with lines, planes, and solids."
Empirical data may be the occasion, but cannot be the ground of the
highest knowledge. According to Leibniz,

"it seems that necessary truths, such as we find in pure
mathematics, and especially in arithmetic and geometry, must
have principles whose proof does not depend upon instances,
nor, consequently, upon the witness of the senses, although
without the senses it would never have come into our heads to
think of them."[340:12]

[Sidenote: The Relation of Thought and its Object in Absolute Realism.]

Sect. 167. The answers which these philosophies give to the question of
_the relation between the state of knowledge and its object_, divide
them into two groups. Among the ancients reason is regarded as the means
of emancipation from the limitations of the private mind. "The sleeping
turn aside each into a world of his own," but "the waking"--the wise
men--"have one and the same world." What the individual knows belongs to
himself only in so far as it is inadequate. Hence for Plato the ideas
are not the attributes of a mind, but that self-subsistent truth to
which, in its moments of insight, a mind may have access. Opinion is "my
own," the truth is being. The position of Aristotle is equally clear.
"Actual knowledge," he maintains, "is identical with its object."

Spinoza and Leibniz belong to another age. Modern philosophy began with
a new emphasis upon self-consciousness. In his celebrated argument--"I
think, hence I am" (_cogito ergo sum_)--Descartes established the
independent and substantial reality of the thinking activity. The "I
think" is recognized as in itself a fundamental being, known intuitively
to the thinker himself. Now although Spinoza and Leibniz are finally
determined by the same motives that obtain in the cases of Plato and
Aristotle, they must reckon with this new distinction between the
thinker and his object. The result in the case of Spinoza is the
doctrine of "parallelism," in which mind is defined as an "infinite
attribute" of substance, an aspect or phase coextensive with the whole
of being. The result in the case of Leibniz is his doctrine of
"representation" and "pre-established harmony," whereby each monadic
substance is in itself an active spiritual entity, and belongs to the
universe through its knowledge of a specific stage of the development of
the universe. But both Spinoza and L