invention,--nay, I am persuaded that it must necessarily be so; and yet
it is possible that all results of this may come to pass. All great
sages are agreed that our whole knowledge moves on ultimately to a
conventional deception, with which, however, the strictest truth can
co-exist. Our purest ideas are by no means images of things, but only
their signs or symbols determined by necessity, and co-existing with
them.

Neither God, nor the human soul, nor the world are really what we
consider them. Our thoughts of these are only the endemic forms in which
the planet we inhabit hands them to us. Our brain belongs to this
planet; accordingly, also, the idioms of our ideas, which are treasured
up in it. But the power of the soul is peculiar, necessary, and always
consistent: the capricious nature of the materials through which it finds
expression changes nothing in the eternal laws, as long as this
capriciousness does not stand in contradiction with itself, and so long
as the sign remains true to the thing it designates. As the thinking
power develops the relations of the idioms, these relations of things
must also really be present in them. Therefore, truth is no property of
the idioms, but of the conclusion; it is not the likeness of the sign
with the thing signified, of the conception with the object; but the
agreement of this conception with the laws of thought. In a similar
manner, the doctrine of quantity makes use of cyphers which are nowhere
present, except upon paper, and yet it finds with them what is present in
the world of reality. For example, what resemblance is there between the
letters A and B, the signs : and =, +, and -, and the fact that has to be
ascertained? Yet the comet, foretold centuries before, advances from a
remote corner of the heavens and the expected planet eclipses the disk
at the proper time. Trusting to the infallibility of his calculation,
the discoverer Columbus plunges into unknown regions of the sea to seek