ly lies
not in claiming reason as the absolute, but in assuming that the
absolute is beyond and against reason.

There is nothing new in this explanation; and it is none the worse for
being old. If Anaxagoras discerned it dimly, and many a one since him
has spoken of Intelligence, Reason, Nous or Logos as the constructive
factor of the creation; if "all the riper religions of the Orient
assumed as their fundamental principle that unless the Highest
penetrates all parts of the Universe, and itself conditions whatever is
conditioned, no universal order, no Kosmos, no real existence is
thinkable;"[106-1] such inadequate expressions should never obscure the
truth that reason in its loftiest flights descries nothing nobler than
itself.

The relative, as its name implies, for ever presupposes and points to
the absolute, the latter an Intelligence also, not one that renders ours
futile and fallacious, but one that imparts to ours the capacity we
possess of reaching eternal and ubiquitous truth. The severest
mathematical reasoning forces us to this conclusion, and we can dispense
with speculation about it.

Only on the principle which here receives its proof, that man has
something in him of God, that the norm of the true holds good
throughout, can he know or care anything about divinity. "It takes a
god to discern a god," profoundly wrote Novalis.

When a religion teaches what reason disclaims, not through lack of
testimony but through a denial of the rights of reason, then that
religion wars against itself and will fall. Faith is not the acceptance
of what intelligence rejects, but a suspension of judgment for want of
evidence. A thoroughly religious mind will rejoice when its faith is
shaken with doubt; for the doubt indicates increased light rendering
perceptible some possible error not before seen.

Least of all should a believer in a divine revelation deny the oneness
of intelligence. For if he is right, then the revealed truth he talks
about is but relative and partial, and those inspired men who claimed
for it the sign manual of the Absolute were fools, insane or liars.

If the various arguments I have rehearsed indicate conclusively that in
the laws of thought we have the norms of absolute truth--and skepticism
on this point can be skepticism and not belief only by virtue of the
very law which it doubts--some important corollaries present themselves.

Regarding in the first place the nature of these laws, we fi