berrant. The latter, in its highest
exhibition in a conscious intelligence, can alone guide itself by the
representation of law, by the sense of Duty. Such an intelligence has
both the faculty to see and the power to choose and appropriate to its
own behoof, and thus to build itself up out of those truths which are
"from everlasting unto everlasting."

A purely formal truth of this kind as something wholly apart from
phenomena, not in any way connected with the knowledge derived through
the senses, does not admit of doubt and can never be changed by future
conquests of the reasoning powers. We may rest upon it as something more
permanent than matter, greater than Nature.

Such was the vision that inspired the noble lines of Wordsworth:--

"What are things eternal?--Powers depart,
Possessions vanish, and opinions change,
And passions hold a fluctuating seat;
But, by the storms of circumstance unshaken,
And subject neither to eclipse nor wane,
Duty exists; immutably survive
For our support, the measures and the forms
Which an abstract intelligence supplies;
Whose kingdom is where time and space are not."

There is no danger that we shall not know what is thus true when we see
it. The sane reason cannot reject it. "The true," says Novalis, "is that
which we cannot help believing." It is the _perceptio per solam
essentiam_ of Spinoza. It asks not faith nor yet testimony; it stands in
need of neither.

Mathematical truth is of this nature. We cannot, if we try, believe
that twice two is five. Hence the unceasing effort of all science is to
give its results mathematical expression. Such truth so informs itself
with will that once received, it is never thereafter alienated;
obedience to it does not impair freedom. Necessity and servitude do not
arise from correct reasoning, but through the limitation of fallacies.
They have nothing to do with

"Those transcendent truths
Of the pure intellect, that stand as laws
Even to Thy Being's infinite majesty."

It is not derogatory, but on the contrary essential to the conception of
the Supreme Reason, the Divine Logos, to contemplate its will as in
accord and one with the forms of abstract truth. "The 'will of God'"
says Spinoza, "is the refuge of ignorance; the true Will is the spirit
of right reasoning."

This identification of the forms of thought with the Absolute is almost
as old as philosophy itself. The objections