which is to purge our understanding of its subjective illusions. Exactly as the Law of Sufficient Reason[1] must limit itself, as we just now saw, by the real and higher Law of Causation, so that the universe-process may strictly begin, so must the other subjective logical principle, the Law of Contradiction,[2] be construed not to exclude, but to include, the Law of Natural Antagonism; otherwise the Mechanics of Nature would be impossible.
The three laws teach us, too, not only to recognise the presence of continuity throughout existence, but how to interpret it with precision, and not to obliterate difference in our anxiety to establish identity. The Law of Difference and the Law of Definite Number not only provide for the movement of Nature through the determinate steps of the inorganic and the organic, but also for the ascent by a specifically new element from the lifeless to the living, then from the plant to the animal, and finally from animal to man, with his rational consciousness. The whole, to be sure, must be developed through the single principle of mechanism, but the now favourite doctrine of the “persistence of force” violates the essential principle that specific differences — primitive Types —
