II.
But it must be remembered that the intellect which is the organ of truth, and objective reality which is abstract truth, do not come together to form knowledge in any accidental way.
A basket may be said to have capacity for holding potatoes, and potatoes may lend themselves as content to fill up the basket. But the union of potatoes and basket; the one as content, the other as capacity, is only mechanical. The basket would serve as well to hold onions, or muskadines, or chinquepins, as potatoes, and the potatoes could be carried as well in a wooden box or in a tin pan, as in a basket. No necessity inheres in the nature of a basket to contain potatoes, and no necessity is in the nature of potatoes to get into a basket. Truth and the intellect, however, are intended the one for the other. Truth is correlated to the intellect as the bird’s wing is to the atmosphere. Nothing can take hold of the truth but the intellect, and nothing can satisfy and furnish the intellect but truth.
Abstract truth, or objective reality, is converted by the combining organizing activity of the mind into knowledge, and when this knowledge corresponds to the reality it is truth in the realm of thought.
Before knowledge is possible, then, there must be an intelligence capable of knowing, and an object capable of being known.
How the intelligence and the knowable object get together to form knowledge is the most important question in philosophy. Upon the right settlement of it, everything depends. This has been the point about which the battle of thought, in modern times, has been most fiercely waged. If the mind firmly grasps the meaning of this problem and settles it right, it is almost sure to think right on other questions. If it is wrong here, it is sure to be wrong everywhere else. Mistake here is as fatal to the correct solution of the question we are considering, as would be the mistake that two and two make five to the correct solution of a sum in arithmetic.