THE LIMITS OF EVOLUTION 1 7 



"knowledge is of things we see," is to dogmatise in 

 the very premises of the debate, and to raid upon the 

 central matter at issue. The question whether we 

 have not some knowledge independent of any and 

 all experience — whether there must not, unavoid- 

 ably, be some knowledge a priori, some knowledge 

 which we come at simply by virtue of our nature — 

 is really the paramount question, around which the 

 whole conflict in philosophy concentrates, and on the 

 decision of which the settlement of every other ques- 

 tion hangs. To cast the career of a philosophy upon 

 a negative answer to it, as if this were a matter of 

 course, — which the English school from Hobbes on- 

 ward has continually done, — is to proceed not only 

 upon a pctitio, but upon a delusion regarding the 

 security of the road. 



This placid and complacent delusion might far more 

 fitly be called an ignoratio elencJii — an " overlooking 

 of the thumbscrew" — than the fallacy which actu- 

 ally has that name ; for those who entertain it are 

 blind to the snare laid for them in the very struc- 

 ture of that experience on which they build their 

 doctrine, and risk unawares the thumbscrew pre- 

 pared by Kant. He suggested that experience may 

 be not at all simple, but always complex, so that the 

 very possibility of the experience which seems to the 

 empiricist the absolute foundation of knowledge may 

 depend on the presence in it of a factor that will 

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