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.  Thus in

                         ‘Prothesis’
               ‘Thesis’ ‘Antithesis’
                         ‘Synthesis’

we have the Tetrad indeed in the intellectual and intuitive contemplation, but a Triad in discursive arrangement, and a Tri-unity in result. [3]

Ib. p. 144.

Seeing the great difficulties that lie in the way of increasing charities so as to meet the increase of population, or even so as to follow it, and the manifold desirableness of parish Churches, with the material dignity that in a right state of Christian order would attach to them, as compared with meeting-houses, chapels, and the like—­all more or less ‘privati juris’, I have often felt disposed to wish that the large majestic Church, central to each given parish, might have been appropriated to Public Prayer, to the mysteries of Baptism and the Lord’s Supper, and to the ‘quasi sacramenta’, Marriage, Penance, Confirmation, Ordination, and to the continued reading aloud, or occasional chanting, of the Scriptures during the intervals of the different Services, which ought to be so often performed as to suffice successively for the whole population; and that on the other hand the chapels and the like should be entirely devoted to teaching and expounding.