that the okapi has been known only since 1900. It lives in remote parts of the Congo Free State and being very shy it can be trapped by the natives only in pits. It is practically a stunted giraffe. Its forefeet are shorter and its neck less high than those of its more favored cousins. In place of horns it has mere buttons, and its skeleton most resembles those extinct primitive types of its species which from the places where they have been found, in Hellas and in Samos, have been named Helladotherium and Samotherium. Naturalists have become assured of the existence of this rare animal through its fur and skeleton, because it has been impossible to bring any living specimen within the sight of the white man. The probability is that the okapi will soon join the choir invisible where it will be in the company of the Helladotherium and the Samotherium.

As the okapi is a mere deviation from the giraffe type, so the okapi theories of mathematics are in principle like their better known cousin, Euclidean geometry. They are merely a variety which however proves less fit for survival. The okapi will have disappeared by the time civilization has reached to its present abode.

I learn to my surprise from Professor Halsted that the word "okapi" has only recently been introduced to the English speaking public in the new appendix of the Century Dictionary, whereas the continental lexicons have been familiar with it since the appearance of the first travelers' reports about the existence of this strange beast.

It is true enough that "the debate 'what is truth,' is a wrangle unless it give precedence to the kenlore question," but we would deny Professor Halsted's assumption that "we find our knowing is ever subject to our wishing." Reality intrudes upon us and we become acquainted with facts whether or not we wish to have any acquaintance with them, and their nature does not depend upon our desire.

The facts are that the thinking subject, being part of

reality, is in constant interaction with it, and the problem is, how did the thinking subject originate from reality and how is a representation of reality possible in the thinking subject? This, as we have stated, is answered through the formal sciences. The formal sciences are possible because the most significant attribute of reality is form, and having gained a general knowledge of pure form through abstraction from reality, the thinking subject constructs systems of pure form which, when we try to describe reality, can be used as methods of cognition for measuring, counting, and tracing interrelations.

Kant wondered why our notions of pure form should tally with the conditions of the objective world, of nature, of reality; but this fundamental problem of kenlore is solved if we bear in mind that the general notion of pure form has been derived through experience from the objective world.

Formal thought is the origin of cognition and it is applicable to objective existence because form is the essential feature of all things. It is not an accident that the natural laws (e. g., Kepler's and Newton's laws) are summed up in "formulas" and that universals of any kind are best described by the word "uniformities." Science practically consists of classifying forms, of noting interrelations and tracing transformations.

Even the law of the conservation of energy is based upon this same foundation. It is a purely formal statement, for it simply means that nothing originates and nothing is annihilated, all processes of nature are transformations. The law of conservation of matter and energy is as purely a priori as the propositions 1+0= 1 and 1—0= I. It can neither be refuted nor proved by experience, because the idea has not been derived from experience but is a product of mental reflection, the result of pure thought.

The same is true of causation which is only the positive

aspect of the law of transformation of which the law of conservation of energy is the negative counterpart. We can trace the concatenation of cause and effect, but we can never prove its universality from experience.

Form is a feature of reality and formal thought originates in thinking beings in response to the actions of the form-conditions of their surroundings with which they become acquainted by experience.

The systematic character of the formal sciences is of our own making, but the conditions of these mental constructions have been quarried out of the mine of experience, and so our conception of form is merely the picture of form in the objective world, as it is mirrored in the human mind.

We conclude this exposition of the part which ideal constructions play in kenlore by an example. We pin a silken thread down in two points and move the point of a pencil at its stretched end. The line resulting from this operation turns out to be an ellipse and ellipses are the paths of the planets. We study the nature of ellipses and formulate the theorems which we learn from the observation of our constructions and when we watch the motions of the planets in the heavens we can by the help of the geometry of ellipses predetermine the progress and all further positions of the planets.

It is a strange fact that these constructions made of ideas of pure form can be so helpful. They serve us as a key to experience, yea these purely formal thoughts are the mentality of our mind. They furnish the method by which sense impressions change into intelligible experience, and the elements from which they grow, being notions of pure form, can not be traced in the sense elements of experience.

The data of sense experience furnish particular facts but not the principle of universality. They are single items, but not the method according to which they appear as instances of general types. They are definite events or concrete

things, not laws, nor norms which would explain why they happen to be such as they are and what they would be like if in one way or another conditions were changed. The latter, laws, principles, methods, are mind-made; the former, the facts of experience, are nature, and nature is a play of transformations.

The laws of pure form are mind-made, but mind in its turn is nature-made. Sentient substance originates and nature impresses its own character into its fabric. There is first a sensing of concrete forms, then a recognition of pure form (that is to say, of form in abstract thought, of form in and by itself) and finally we have the methodical construction of systems of pure form.

The interrelations and interactions of feelings, their formal feature, is what we commonly designate as “mind”; and a systematized conception of them is in a word called "reason." There is no reason, no argumentative faculty such as is human reason, in nature, but there is a formative cosmic order determining all the particular facts of objective existence, and of this cosmic formative order human reason is an echo. From this norm which dominates the world and which is reconstructed in our mind we derive those principles of all our purely formal methods, our principles of logic and logical necessity, of universality, of our fundamental conditions for mathematical thought and geometrical constructions, and here accordingly lies the cornerstone of kenlore.

EDITOR.

CRITICISMS AND DISCUSSIONS.

TRUTH AND NATURE.

I.

Of all the myriad idols which men have shaped them of their imaginings none stands forth so austere, so august, and so transcendently elusive as truth. We are wont to think of the human mind as demanding in the objects of its enthusiasms a certain concrete vividness, sense and emotion wrought upon in unison. And indeed, when we contemplate the long pageant of by-gone worships, we do find therein sensuous color and brilliancy: the pantheons of the nations, the symbols of cult and creed, are the ornate illumination of the scroll of mental history. Nevertheless, upon reflection, we perceive clearly that the showy outward appeals are no real clue to the enthusiasms they arouse. For these appeals are utterly impermanent, pantheon giving way to pantheon, symbol to symbol, with kaleidoscopic ease of mutation; but the motive which yields in turn to the sway of each, the zeal and veneration of the religious spirit, ever remains, unabated and unabashed through all the change. Surely this motive-able to withstand so oft-repeated overthrow of its dearest idols-must spring from an instinct deep-wrought in the human fibre; it must have its source in some perennial prepotency of man's disposition and its final reason in the laws of life. and mind-aye, in the very essence of that Nature which has brought into being life and mind.

And obviously there is, through all the change, a constant factor. It is a factor without which the development of a superbrute intelligence must have been forever impossible, for it is the key and support of the building human mind. This factor is belief in truth. And I mean not merely belief in the truth of each seeming revelation as it comes,-not merely sincerity of faith, though this is an evident corollary. But what humanizes intelligence is belief in the worth of truth for its own sake; it is belief in true thinking