1891.] on the Implications of Science. 441 



what would or would not be the necessary results attending such 

 imaginary conditions ? How could they confidently declare what 

 perceptions such conditions would certainly produce, unless they 

 were themselves convinced of the validity of the laws regulating 

 the experiences of such beings ? If they affirm, as they do, that they 

 perceive what must be the truth in their supposed case, they thereby 

 implicitly assert the existence of some absolutely necessary truths, 

 or else their own argument itself falls to the ground. 



But this same implication of science respecting the objective, 

 absolute validity of the law of contradiction, also refutes that popular 

 system of philosophy which declares that all our knowledge is merely 

 relative and that we can know nothing as it really exists indepen- 

 dently of our knowledge of it — the system which proclaims the 

 relativity of knowledge. 



Of course anything which is known to us cannot at the same time 

 be unknown to us, and so far as this, our knowledge may be said to 

 afifect the things we know. But this is trivial. Our knowing or 

 not knowing any object is — apart from some act of ours which results 

 from our knowledge — a mere accident of that body's existence which 

 is not otherwise aifected thereby. 



Again, as I before remarked, nothing, so far as we know, exists 

 by itself, and unrelated to any other thing. To say, therefore, that 

 all our knowledge is relative, might only mean that knowledge con- 

 cords with objective reality. But this is by no means what the 

 upholders of the relativity of knowledge intend to signify : they deny 

 the objective validity, the actual correspondence with reality, of any 

 of our percej)tious or cognitions — even, as Mr. Herbert Spencer tells 

 us, our cognition of difference. 



Every system of knowledge, however, must start with the assump- 

 tion, implied or expressed, that something is true. By the teachers 

 of the doctrine of the relativity of knowledge it is evidently taught 

 that this doctrine of the relativity of knowledge is true. But if we 

 cannot know that anything corresj)onds with external reality, if 

 nothing we can assert has more than a relative or phenomenal value, 

 then this character must also appertain to the doctrine of the relativity 

 of knowledge. Either tbis system of philosophy is merely relative or 

 phenomenal, and cannot be known tO be true, or else it is absolutely 

 true and can be known so to be. But it must be merely relative and 

 phenomenal, if everything known by man is such. Its value, then, 

 can be only relative and phenomenal ; therefore it cannot be known to 

 correspond with external reality, and cannot be asserted to be true ; 

 and anybody who asserts that we can know it to be true, thereby 

 asserts that it is false to say that our knowledge is only relative. In 

 that case some of our knowledge must be absolute ; but this upsets 

 the foundation of the whole system. Any one who upholds such a 

 system as this may be compared to a man seated high up on the 

 branch of a tree which he is engaged in sawing across where it 



