THE QUESTION OP QUESTIONS 



sophic thinkers of any weight, whether gnostic or 

 agnostic (I use the words in their primary senses), 

 are found to agree and that is in the belief that 

 reality, whether knowable or unknowable* whether 

 personal or impersonal, material or immaterial, is 

 one. No philosophy that counts is content with 

 anything but some form of monism. If we believe 

 in God and nature as antithetic, we must at any 

 rate declare that God made nature from His own 

 substance ; if we believe in mind and matter as anti- 

 thetic, though knowable, we must at any rate de- 

 clare that reality consists in the "union of subject 

 and object"; and so forth. Mr. Balfour, who 

 ranks at times beside the ancient sceptic who de- 

 nied everything, even to denying that he denied 

 anything, doubts whether there are any grounds 

 for this constant search for the One; 1 but, at any 

 rate, we find that a belief in the unity of reality is 

 common to all the systems that are not negligible. 

 Whether reality be a knowable God, or the un- 

 known God, or matter, or the "unknowable," it 

 is believed to be one. 



As a camp-follower of those who believe that we 

 cannot know reality, I am in company too good to 

 permit me any distress at the allegation of " hav- 

 ing one of those uncentred minds which cannot be 

 happy without a mystery"; and so I hope I can 

 refer, without any resentment due to such an un- 

 kind heart-thrust, to a lately published volume 



Presidential address to the British Association, Oxford, 

 1904. 



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