Love is something more than the desire for beauty. . . . He who has the instinct of true love, and can discern the relations of true beauty in every form, will go on from strength to strength until at last the vision is revealed to him of a single science, and he will suddenly perceive a nature of wondrous beauty, in the likeness of no human face or form, but absolute, simple, separate, and everlasting. Socrates. CHAPTER I BEING, AS PERCEIVED Most ignorant of what he's most assured.-Shakespeare. WITH the assurance that truth, as we find it, is an affirmation of absolute truth, implied in the facts of being, we proceed to inquire, What are the implications of being? In this inquiry three cardinal questions arise in the natural order of knowing: 1. What of being is positively known?-treated in this chapter. 2. Resulting from this knowledge what conception of being must we form? Chapter II, "Being, as Conceived." 3. Does that conception disclose the data of a philosophic system of evolution? Or, in other words, Do the truths which the fact of being thrusts upon us appear as merely a mass of fragmentary, unrelated ideas, or do they give us a validly discriminated conception of being in general? As we proceed to ascertain the answers to the first and second of these interrogatories we shall find the answer to the third and present it in Chapter III, "Being, as Conditioned." Facts are enacted realities. Truths include, besides facts, the relations of facts and their inferences. But it is with facts as distinguished from other forms of truth we would chiefly deal. Fact, in our use of the term, includes enacted realities, both perceived and implied. Facts which we directly perceive imply other facts which we cannot perceive, but which the mind recognizes that we must accept along with the perceived facts in order that the latter may be intelligible. Otherwise, the perception must be surrendered, which is to surrender knowledge. Perceived facts are self-evident to our direct perceptive power by either consciousness or the senses. Implied facts are self-evidently implied in the perceived facts as either given with them or implied as their cause. For example, all human beings who have looked upon the moon have seen but one and the same side of that orb. That side is self-evident to their perception by the sense of sight. But the other side is a fact which they have never seen, never perceived, but which is equally selfevident to them by direct implication. That is to say, the fact of the other side is directly, or necessarily, given with the perception of this side. The general fact, the moon, is the self-evident knowledge we have thrust upon us by perceiving its one side. That knowledge includes both sides, one perceived, the other implied, and equally self-evident. But this side of the moon is not the cause of the other, nor the other of this; nor do we accept the fact of the other side as an inference from the side we perceive, but as a fact necessarily given in the perception, without which it is impossible to think of either. Another form of implication is that of cause, or dependence the dependence of a perceived fact upon its cause, which cause may not be at all perceptible, yet is necessarily implied as the cause of the fact perceived. And as it is necessarily implied it is a self-evident fact. For example, here are two bodies, one living, the other dead. They are so termed because motion, the evidence of life, is perceived in one, but not in the other. But the perception of this evidence is not the perception of the fact we term life. Life is the chief fact which differentiates the two bodies, but it is a fact which cannot be perceived. It is an implied fact which is self-evident, |