22 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHY 



propagandism would imply, and which the throng of 

 its generally intelligent but inexpert readers are prone 

 to take for granted, the agnostic system appears to 

 the critical student of philosophy as logically an open 

 question at best. 



The self-contradiction of agnosticism — to pass now 

 to its second alleged defect — is a characteristic which 

 it shares in common with other philosophies that fall 

 short of a view completely comprehensive. The self- 

 contradiction comes out in a peculiar way, particularly 

 interesting for the critical history of thought. It 

 may be made apparent as follows. The system main- 

 tains at once the two propositions, (i) that all know- 

 ledge is founded wholly on sense-perception, physical 

 or psychic, and is consequently restricted to the ob- 

 jects and items of experience, that is, to phenomena 

 merely ; and (2) that the Reality beyond phenomena 

 is nevertheless an immutable datum of consciousness, 

 that is, an unquestionable certainty, or, in equivalent 

 words, a matter of unqualified knowledge. In short, 

 it is maintained that we can only know by means of 

 sense, and yet can really know that the supersensible 

 exists ; that our cognitive powers are confined to the 

 field of phenomena, and yet that they somehow pene- 

 trate beyond that field sufficiently to knoiv that a 

 Noumenon is real. We are naturally led to ask, By 

 what strange power is this feat accomplished.-' — by 

 what criterion of truth is this certainty tested .-* Of 



