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'; but doubtless the principle of Trichotomy is necessarily involved in the Polar Logic, which again is the same with the Pythagorean 'Tetractys', that is, the eternal fountain or source of nature; and this being sacred to contemplations of identity, and prior in order of thought to all division, is so far from interfering with Trichotomy as the universal form of division (more correctly of distinctive distribution in logic) that it implies it.

'Prothesis' being by the very term anterior to 'Thesis' can be no part of it.