This historic book may have numerous typos, missing text or index. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. 1888. Not illustrated. Excerpt: ... Chap, v.: THE SPECULATIVE IDEAL. 329 case, how can it be demanded of knowledge that it should exhibit the certainty and the intelligibility of a given relation through a process of mediation which does not exist in that relation itself? Thus then there may certainly be synthetic truths of an ultimate and absolutely simple nature, which as conceived in their purest and most simple form possess a validity guaranteed not merely by fact but by their own self-evidence, a self-evidence however which if we insist on grounding all logical truth on the principle of Identity, must no longer be called logical but aesthetic, and which accordingly will find the touchstone of its validity no longer in the unthinkableness but in the plain absurdity of its contradictory. To this class of truths belong the simplest principles of mechanics; that we regard them together with all truths of like kind with them not as the earliest constituents of our knowledge which have been there from the beginning, but as its final results, to be won only with difficulty and labour, has been explained above in terms sufficiently clear to make the repetition of it here superfluous. 365. Special lines of enquiry lead in the first instance to single truths of this nature, each one its own evidence and standing in no need of support from others. At the same time nothing prevents us from bringing them as members of one and the same world into connexion with each other and searching for a single supreme principle in which they may find their unity, just as each one of them had already supplied a centre of unity for a body of connected facts. It is possible that many such truths may lose in consequence their independent value, and that even logical analysis may reduce them to particular cases of a more g...