A GLANCE AT THE WORK.
277. I have approached the term of my labor; and it is well to cast a glance over the long path which I have travelled.
I proposed to examine the fundamental ideas of our mind, whether considered in themselves, or in their relations to the world.
278. With regard to objects, we have found in our mind two primitive facts; the intuition of extension, and the idea of being. All objective sensibility is founded on the intuition of extension; all the pure intellectual order in what relates to indeterminate ideas, is founded on the idea of being. We have seen that from the idea of being proceed the ideas of identity, distinction, unity, number, duration, time, simplicity, composition, the finite, the infinite, the necessary, the contingent, the mutable, the immutable, substance, accident, cause, and effect.
279. We find in the subjective order, as facts of consciousness, sensibility, or sensitive being, (including, in this, sentiment as well as sensation,) intelligence, and will; whence we have intuitive ideas of determinate modes of being, distinct from extended beings.
280. Thus all the elements of our mind are reduced to the intuitive ideas of extension, sensibility, intelligence,and will, and the indeterminate ideas which are all founded on the idea of being.
281. From the idea of being, combined with not-being, springs the principle of contradiction, which of itself produces only indeterminate cognitions. In order that science should have an object that could be realized, the idea of being must be presented under some form. Our intuition gives two: extension, and consciousness.
282. Consciousness presents three modes of being: sensibility, or sensitive being; intelligence, and will.
283. Extension, considered in all its purity, as we imagine it in space, is the basis of geometry.
284. The same extension modified in various ways, and placed in relation with our sensibility, is the basis of all the natural sciences, of all those which have for their object, the corporeal universe.
285. Intelligence gives rise to ideology and psychology.
286. The will, in so far as moved by ends, gives rise to the moral sciences.
287. The idea of being begets the principle of contradiction; and, by this principle, the general and indeterminate ideas, whose combination produces ontology, which circulates, like a life-giving fluid, through all the other sciences.
288. Such I conceive the tree of human science: to examine its roots was the object of theFundamental Philosophy.