After this I waited on him (Dr. John Owen) at London again, and he came once to me to my lodgings, when I was in town near him. And he told me that he received my chiding letter and perceived that I suspected his reality in the business; but he was so hearty in it that I should see that he really meant as he spoke, concluding in these words, "You shall see it, and my practice shall reproach your diffidence" * * *. About a month after I went to him again, and he had done nothing, but was still hearty for the work. And to be short, I thus waited on him time after time, till my papers had been near a year and a quarter in his hand, and then I advised him to return them to me, which he did, with these words, "I am still a well-wisher to those mathematics;"—without any other words about them, or ever giving me any more exception against them. And this was the issue of my third attempt for union with the Independents.
Dr. Owen was a man of no ordinary intellect. It would be interesting to have his conduct in this point, seemingly so strange, in some measure explained: The words "those mathematics" look like an innuendo, that Baxter's scheme of union, by which all the parties opposed to the Prelatic Church were to form a rival Church, was, like the mathematics, true indeed, but true only in the idea, that is, abstracted from the subject matter. Still there appears a very chilling want of open-heartedness on the part of Owen, produced perhaps by the somewhat overly and certainly most ungracious resentments of Baxter. It was odd at least to propose concord in the tone and on the alleged ground of an old grudge.
Ib.
I have been twenty-six years convinced that dichotomizing will not do it, but that the divine Trinity in Unity hath expressed itself in the whole frame of nature and morality * * *. But he, Mr. George Lawson, had not hit on the true method of the vestigia Trinitatis, &c.
Among Baxter's philosophical merits, we ought not to overlook, that the substitution of Trichotomy for the old and still general plan of Dichotomy in the method and disposition of Logic, which forms so prominent and substantial an excellence in Kant's Critique of the Pure Reason, of the Judgment, and the rest of his works, belongs originally to Richard Baxter, a century before Kant;—and this not as a hint, but as a fully evolved and systematically applied principle. Nay, more than this:—Baxter grounded it on an absolute idea presupposed in all intelligential acts: whereas Kant takes it only as a fact in which he seems to anticipate or suspect some yet deeper truth latent, and hereafter to be discovered.
On recollection, however, I am disposed to consider
this
alone as Baxter's peculiar claim, I have not indeed any distinct memory of Giordano Bruno's
Logice Venatrix Veritatis