THE RELATIVITY OF ALL KNOWLEDGE. 91 



they are appearances; for appearance without reality is un- 

 thinkable. Strike out from the argument the terms Un- 

 conditioned, Infinite, Absolute, with their equivalents, and 

 in place of them write, " negation of conceivability," or 

 possible," and you find that the argument becomes non- 

 sense. Truly to realize in thought any one of the proposi- 

 tions of which the argument consists, the Unconditioned 

 must be represented as positive and not negative. How then 

 can it be a legitimate conclusion from the argument, that 

 our consciousness of it is negative ? An argument, the very 

 construction of which assigns to a certain term a certain 

 meaning, but which ends in showing that this term has no 

 such meaning, is simply an elaborate suicide. Clearly, then, 

 the very demonstration that a definite consciousness of the 

 Absolute is impossible to us, unavoidably presupposes an in- 

 definite consciousness of it. 



Perhaps the best way of showing that by the necessary 

 conditions of thought, we are obliged to form a positive 

 though vague consciousness of this which transcends distinct 

 consciousness, is to analyze our conception of the antithesis 

 between Relative and Absolute. It is a doctrine called in 

 question by none, that such antinomies of thought as Whole 

 and Part, Equal and Unequal, Singular and Plural, are 

 necessarily conceived as correlatives: the conception of a 

 part is impossible without the conception of a whole ; there 

 can be no idea of equality without one of inequality. And it 

 is admitted that in the same manner, the Relative is itself 

 conceivable as such, only by opposition to the Irrelative or 

 Absolute. Sir William Hamilton however, in his 



trenchant (and in most parts unanswerable) criticism on 

 Cousin, contends, in conformity with his position above 

 stated, that one of these correlatives is nothing whatever be- 

 yond the negation of the other. " Correlatives v he says 

 " certainly suggest each other, but correlatives may, or may 

 not, be equally real and positive. In thought contradictories 

 necessarily imply each other, for the knowledge of contra- 



