There are absolute truths, and necessary truths, among the elements of human knowledge.

Account for them as we may, their reality cannot be reasonably denied, nor their importance disparaged.
There is a tendency--and a most useful one--in the human mind, to seek unity in all things, to trace effects to causes, to reduce phenomena to laws, to resolve the complex into the simple, and to rise from the contingent to the absolute, from the finite to the infinite.

There are few more interesting inquiries in the department of Psychology than that which seeks to investigate the nature, the origin, and the validity of those ideas which introduce us into the region of absolute, eternal, and immutable Truth; and it were a lamentable result of the erratic speculations of Germany did they serve to cast discredit on this inquiry, or even to excite a prejudice against it, in the more sober, but not less profound, minds of our own countrymen.

But there need be little apprehension on this score, if it be clearly understood and carefully remembered, that the philosophy of the absolute, as taught in Germany and applied in support of Pantheism, rests ultimately on the theory of Idealism and the doctrine of Identity, by which all is resolved into one absolute "subject-object," and _existence_ is identified with _thought_.

_This_ system may be discarded, and yet there may still remain a sound, wholesome, and innocuous philosophy of the "absolute;" a philosophy which does not seek to identify things so generically different as _existence_ and _thought_, or to reduce mind and matter, the finite and the infinite, to the same category; but which, recognizing the differences subsisting between the various objects of thought, seeks merely to investigate the nature and sources of that part of human knowledge which relates to absolute or necessary truths.