The mathematical principles are constitutive, i.e.
The " form " of a thing constitutes it what it is, and at the same time, therefore, is constitutive of the group to which it belongs.
Once more, it would be possible to forget that Mill's ultimate laws or axioms are not in his view intuitions, nor forms constitutive of the rational order, nor postulates of all rational construction, were it not that he has made the endeavour to establish them on associationist lines.
Its effect upon logic is rather to be seen in the rethinking of the traditional body of logical doctrine in the light of an absolute presupposed as ideal, with the postulate that a regulative ideal must ultimately exhibit itself as constitutive, the justification of the postulate being held to lie in the coherence and all-inclusiveness of the result.
The analogues therefore of metaphysical problems must be sought in physics; particularly that problem of the causes of things for which the Platonic idea and the Peripatetic " constitutive form " had been, each in its turn, received solutions.
