tradicted by it. Neither sense nor imagination has
ever portrayed a perfect circle in which the diameter bore to the
circumference the exact proportion which we know it does bear. The very
fact that we have learned that our senses are wholly untrustworthy, and
that experience is always fallacious, shows that we have tests of truth
depending on some other faculty. "Each series of connected facts in
nature furnishes the intimation of an order more exact than that which
it directly manifests."[104-1]

But, it has been urged, granted that we have reached something like
positive knowledge of those laws which are the _order_ of the
manifestation of phenomena, the real Inscrutable, the mysterious
Unknowable, escapes us still; this is the _nature_ of phenomenal
manifestation, "the secret of the Power manifested in Existence."[104-2]
At this point the physicist trips and falls; and here, too, the
metaphysician stumbles.

I have already spoken of our aptitude to be frightened by a chimera, and
deceived by such words as "nature" and "cause." Laws and rules, by which
we express Order, are restrictive only in a condition of intelligence
short of completeness, only therefore in that province of thought which
concerns itself with material facts. The musician is not fettered by the
laws of harmony, but only by those of discord. The truly virtuous man,
remarks Aristotle, never has occasion to practise self-denial. Hence,
mathematically, "the theory of the intellectual action involves the
recognition of a sphere of thought from which all limits are
withdrawn."[105-1] True freedom, real being, is only possible when law
as such is inexistent. Only the lawless makes the law. When the idea of
the laws of order thus disappears in that of free function consistent
with perfect order, when, as Kant expresses it, we ascend from the
contemplation of things acting according to law, to action according to
the representation of law,[105-2] we can, without audacity, believe that
we have penetrated the secret of existence, that we have reached the
limits of explanation and found one wholly satisfying the highest
reason. Intelligence, not apart from phenomena, but parallel with them,
not under law, but through perfect harmony above it, _power one with
being_, the will which is "the essence of reason," the emanant cause of
phenomena, immanent only by the number of its relations we have not
learned, this is the satisfying and exhaustive solution. The fol