viij

PREFACE.

to which there is inviolable authority. This, indeed, has been explained and elucidated by the Alexandrians, and by Proclus especially in this commentary, in such a way that even after the labors begun by Descartes René Descartes, renewed by Kant Immanuel Kant, and more happily completed on the same subject, not a little light and utility is to be drawn from it by the moderns themselves. For here it will be demonstrated most clearly how far he strays from the true method of philosophizing who begins knowledge from Ontology the study of being; and yet that Ontology is not to be despaired of, since, without any hypothesis or fallacy whatsoever, one passes from Psychology the study of the mind to Ontology, through that hidden and most certain intuition of the mind, which looks into substance beneath personality itself, and absolute cause beneath empirical cause. Not that the Alexandrians were entirely free from the superstitions of times and places; but although, while they tried to revive Heathenism Paganism and to support philosophy with it, or it with philosophy, they enclosed science within the past and forbade it any prospect into the future; although they also sinned in that they seemed to hold Philosophy