an
order that transcends facts, and in which facts have their origin, is
undoubtedly chimerical, and as against that the positivists are
unquestionably right. But to maintain that man has no intelligence of
any thing beyond the fact, no intuition or intellectual apprehension of
its principle or cause, is equally chimerical. The human mind cannot
have all science, but it has real science as far as it goes, and real
science is the knowledge of things as they are, not as they are not.
Sensible facts are not intelligible by themselves, because they do not
exist by themselves; and if the human mind could not penetrate beyond
the individual fact, beyond the mimetic to the methexic, or
transcendental principle, copied or imitated by the individual fact, it
could never know the fact itself. The error of modern philosophers, or
philosopherlings, is in supposing the principle is deduced or inferred
from the fact, and in denying that the human mind has direct and
immediate intuition of it.

Something that transcends the sensible order there must be, or there
could be no development; and if we had no science of it, we could never
assert that development is development, or scientifically explain the
laws and conditions of development. Development is explication, and
supposes a germ which precedes it, and is not itself a development; and
development, however far it may be carried, can never do more than
realize the possibilities of the germ. Development is not creation,
and cannot supply its own germ. That at least must be given by the
Creator, for from nothing nothing can be developed. If authority has
not its germ in nature, it cannot be developed from nature
spontaneously or otherwise. All government has a governing will; and
without a will that commands, there is no government; and nature has in
her spontaneous developments no will, for she has no personality.
Reason itself, as distinguished from will, only presents the end and
the means, but does not govern; it prescribes a rule, but cannot ordain
a law. An imperative will, the will of a superior who has the right to
command what reason dictates or approves, is essential to government;
and that will is not developed from nature, because it has no germ in
nature. So something above and beyond nature must be asserted, or
government itself cannot be asserted, even as a development. Nature is
no more self-sufficing than are the people, or than is the individual
man.

No d