WHAT IS MEANT BY PHILOSOPHY? 



of religion, a knowledge of Reality would be the 

 highest kind of religious knowledge, and would, of 

 course, include a knowledge of morality, which 

 many confound with religion. 



Yet here we shall not use the word philosophy 

 to signify knowledge of Reality. The first reason 

 to be advanced is, indeed, not final. It is that the 

 greatest thinkers in all ages have sought to attain 

 this knowledge and have failed, as we may infer 

 from their failure to attain any measure of agree- 

 ment, and from the fact that no one of them has 

 ever had any difficulty in exposing the fallacies 

 and unwarrantable assumptions of all his prede- 

 cessors. But, as I have said, this reason is not 

 final; for it might be maintained that though the 

 proper quest of philosophy has hitherto failed, 

 yet in time to come it may succeed, and therefore 

 the word philosophy must not be debased to any 

 lower use. Reality may be unknown, but is not 

 unknowable. 



Now it is part of the evolutionary philosophy to 

 demonstrate that Reality, or being, the thing that 

 really is, can never be known by us; or, in other 

 words, to assert that the quest of philosophy, in 

 its highest sense, is necessarily foredoomed to fail- 

 ure. It is not merely that the quest has hitherto 

 been fruitless, but that, the conditions of human 

 knowledge being what they are, it must always 

 fail. In a later chapter we must discuss the evi- 

 dence for this belief. Meanwhile let us take it 

 that Reality is unknowable. 

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