in absolute truth, and is competent to attain to it when the requisite exertions are put forth.
13. You thus perceive that the question regarding our competency to attain to absolute truth resolves itself into the new question, Is there in the mind of man a universal part—that is, a part which in all intelligences is essentially of the same character? Intelligence itself seems to constrain us to answer this question in the affirmative. That there is such a part seems to me to be an axiomatic truth of reason. To suppose, for example, that the supreme intelligence has nothing whatever in common with the human intelligence, is to suppose that the one of them is an intelligence, and that the other is no intelligence at all. It is to dissolve the very ground on which we conceive both of them as intelligences. Two intelligences which have nothing whatever in common cannot both of them be intelligences; they cannot be both placed under that category of thought, or indicated by the one word intelligence, because it is only through our thought that they possess some point or quality in common that we can think of them as intelligences; and therefore, to think of them as having no common quality, and at the same time to think of them as intelligent, is to think of them as both having, and as not having, something in common; in other words, it is to think a downright contradiction. This truth, then, in regard to the constitution of the human minds, and of all
