l6 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHY 



shown, that it involves at once a pctitio and a self- 

 contradiction. 



This largest philosophy would no doubt also convict 

 pantheistic idealism of an undue arrest of reason ; but 

 its first concern is to approve the protest of this 

 form of idealism against the assault on the power of 

 reason to reach absolute reality. It approves, too, 

 when this idealism criticises the agnostic interpreta- 

 tion of the method of science, as a shallow analysis of 

 what the method presupposes. Still, its condemna- 

 tion of pantheism, even when pantheism is idealistic, 

 is unyielding, and renders its discredit of the logic 

 employed by agnosticism only the more inexorable. 

 Its justification in both of these adverse judgments 

 will be our main occupation for the rest of this essay, 

 but our first attention must go to what it declares 

 against agnostic evolutionism. And let us turn, first 

 of all, to the proof that this agnosticism, as just 

 alleged, involves a self-contradiction and a begging 

 of the question. 



If it were indubitable that we can only know what 

 our inner and outer senses tell us, — only the facts of 

 present and past experience, — then " it needs must 

 follow as the night the day " that we can know only 

 phenomena, and that the noumenal Reality behind 

 phenomena must remain forever unknowable. But to 

 say, even with deej) Tennyson (God save the mark ! ), 

 that " we have but faith," that " we cannot know," that 



