In this brilliant two-volume work, rationalist Brand Blanshard traces the development and immanent purpose of human thought from the beginnings of perception to its ultimate, transcendent end: the grasp of all reality as a tremendous whole, a vast system interconnected throughout by intelligible relations of necessity.

Not, of course, that he thinks we have _arrived_ at such an understanding, or indeed even that we ever will arrive at it. His concern here is to present this degree of understanding as an _ideal_, as the final goal at which thought implicitly aims to the extent that it deserves to be called thought at all. And his account of this implicit ideal throws its light on the development of human cognition from its very beginnings, just as knowledge of an oak throws light upon the nature of an acorn.

Blanshard was the most empirical of rationalists, having been driven to his rationalist position by a close examination of the realities of human thought; this work is the fruit of that examination. And because he stays close both to philosophy and to human psychology, his work can be profitably read by those in either camp.

And it should be read. Great philosophical treatises are all too seldom written, and this is one of the twentieth century's greatest. Nothing since has matched it in either scope or rigor.