uation of the
human intellect, happening alike to individuals and to entire
generations--in the situation of yearning or craving, as it were, for
a great idea as yet unknown, but dimly and uneasily prefigured.
Sometimes the very brink, as it may be called, of such an idea is
approached; sometimes it is even imperfectly discovered; but with
marks in the very midst of its imperfections, which serve as
indications to a person coming better armed for ascertaining the
sub-conscious thought which had governed their tentative motions. As
it stands in Aristotle's scheme, the idea of a category is a mere
lifeless abstraction. Rising through a succession of species to
genera, and from these to still higher genera, you arrive finally at a
highest genus--a naked abstraction, beyond which no further regress is
possible. This highest genus, this _genus generalissimum_, is, in
peripatetic language, a category; and no purpose or use has ever been
assigned to any one of these categories, of which ten were enumerated
at first, beyond that of classification--_i. e._ a purpose of mere
convenience. Even for as trivial a purpose as this, it gave room for
suspecting a failure, when it was afterwards found that the original
ten categories did not exhaust the possibilities of the case; that
other supplementary categories (_post-praedicamenti_) became necessary.
And, perhaps, 'more last words' might even yet be added, supplementary
supplements, and so forth, by a hair-splitting intellect. Failures as
gross as these, revisals still open to revision, and amendments
calling for amendments, were at once a broad confession that here
there was no falling in with any great law of nature. The paths of
nature may sometimes be arrived at in a tentative way; but they are
broad and determinate; and, when found, vindicate themselves. Still,
in all this erroneous subtilisation, and these abortive efforts, Kant
perceived a grasping at some real idea--fugitive indeed and coy, which
had for the present absolutely escaped; but he caught glimpses of it
continually in the rear; he felt its necessity to any account of the
human understanding that could be satisfactory to one who had
meditated on Locke's theory as probed and searched by Leibnitz. And in
this uneasy state--half sceptical, half creative, rejecting and
substituting, pulling down and building up--what was in sum and
finally the course which he took for bringing his trials and essays to
a crisis? He state