PROP. X.————
suppose that the aim of this philosophy was to explain how that which was already knowable and intelligible, became knowable and intelligible, would be to impute to it an amount of ineptitude which it was reserved for a much later generation of theorists to incur. This, then, is its problem, to explain how the contradictory becomes comprehensible; and the following is the way in which it goes to work. It fixes Sense as the faculty of the contradictory, the faculty of nonsense (δύναμις τοῦ ἀλόγου). This faculty seizes on the nonsensical, the contradictory, the unintelligible (τὰ ἀλόγα or τὸ ἀνοήτα). It lays hold of the material universe per se, and this, in that unsupplemented condition, is the absurd, the senseless, the insane, the incomprehensible to all intellect (τὸ ἀλόγον). The problem, now, is to explain how this world of nonsense, apprehended by this faculty of nonsense, becomes the world of intelligence, the knowable and known universe (τὸ νοήτον). And this conversion is explained by the contribution of some element which Intellect (νοῦς) supplies out of its own resources, and adds to the world of nonsense, which then, being supplemented by this heterogeneous element, starts out of the night of contradiction into the daylight of completed cognition. What this element is these old philosophers did not find it so easy to explain.
10. In dealing with the history of philosophical
