thing of which there are or may be other instances to an indefinite extent This something is innate; it is the principle, the presiding fact or law of the arrangement by which men, and other things, are placed under classes. But it cannot, as I said, be represented or placed before the mind as an object. When viewed as an object, its innate character is destroyed.
30. From what has been said in regard to the Platonic ideas being innate, it might be inferred that they were also subjective, or the proper and peculiar endowments of the human mind. This, however, is not the doctrine which Plato maintains. Ideas are not subjective in the sense of belonging peculiarly to the mind of man; they are rather objective, inasmuch as they are the light of all intellect, the principles of universal reason. No intelligence can operate without ideas, that is, without a capacity of apprehending resemblances and differences, and without obeying those laws of unity and arrangement which declare themselves in genera and species. All intellect must think under the conditions of resemblance and difference, genus and species.
These laws, therefore, are objective and not subjective; they are the laws of things as well as the laws of thoughts. For the universe and all that it contains are constructed in conformity with these ideas, they are constructed under the laws of resemblance and difference, genus and species, and could not
