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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
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