114 DEVELOPMENT OF CARTESIANISM. activity is his activity, that the human (finite) spirit is re- lated to the divine (infinite) spirit as the individual body to space in general, viz., as a section of it, so that, by think- ing away all limitations from our mind, we find God in us and ourselves in him, it shows how nearly he verges on pantheism. Geulincx's services to noetics have been duly recognized by Ed. Grimm (Jena, 1875), although with an excessive approximation to Kant. In this field he advances many acute and suggestive thoughts, as the deduction which reappears in Lotze, that the actually existent world of figure and motion cognized by thought, though the real world, is poorer than the wonderful world of motley sen- suous appearance conjured forth in our minds on the occa- sion of the former, that the latter is the more beautiful and more worthy of a divine author. Further, the conviction, also held by Lotze, that the fundamental activities of the mind cannot be defined, but only known through inner ex- perience or immediate consciousness (he who loves, knows what love is ; it is a per conscientiam et intitnam experien- tiam notissima res); the praiseworthy attempt to give a systematic arrangement, according to their derivation from one another, to the innate mathematical concepts, which Descartes had simply co-ordinated (the concept of surface is gained from the concept of body by abstracting from the third dimension, thickness — the act of thus abstracting from certain parts of the content of thought, Geulincx terms consideratio in contrast to cogitatio, which includes the whole content); and, finally, the still more important inquiry, whether it is possible for us to reach a knowledge of things independently of the forms of the understanding, as in pure thought we strip off the fetters of sense. The possibility of this is denied ; there is no higher faculty of knowledge to act as judge over the understanding, as the latter over the sensibility, and even the wisest man cannot free himself from the forms of thought (categories, modi cogitandt). And yet the discussion of the question is not useless: the reason should examine into the unknowable as well as the knowable ; it is only in this way that we learn that it is unknowable. As the highest forms of thought
