The Making of a Man

by James W. Lee

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.

III.

The distance of a question from ordinary thought does not render it any the less important, even for ordinary thinking. How the knowing intelligence and the knowable object get together to form knowledge is the most important problem to-day before the human mind. If writers would only take their bearings from the only rational solution that can be given to it, they would find half the books they are writing on the inspiration of the Scriptures, the existence of God, the divinity of Jesus Christ, agnosticism and materialism, unnecessary.

Agnosticism and materialism pass away with a correct theory of knowing. Labor and painstaking thought are involved in the task of getting a right theory of knowledge, but agnosticism and materialism are in line with ignorance and indolence.

So, while few men ever ask themselves how the knowing intelligence and the knowable object get together to form knowledge, millions of men are affected, even in their practical life, by the answer which is given to the question. Someone has said that not more than six men in any one age ever read Plato or understand him. Yet for the six men Plato comes down through the ages. The six men who understand him translate him into the vernacular of the one hundred men who live on the next plane of thought below them.

The one hundred translate him into the common language of one thousand below them. These, in turn, translate Plato into the ordinary thought of the millions below them. So it happens at length that Plato gets so universally known, that not a laborer in the field but wears his hat after one style, rather than another, because Plato wrote.