24 ESSAYS IN FUILOSOPHY 



and are unable to tell whether the thinking means 

 anything more than its own occurrence, or not ? Con- 

 strued with rigorous consistency, then, the existence 

 of a noumenal Unknowable as " an immutable datum 

 of consciousness" turns out to mean nothing but this : 

 That our conceptions are built for us in such irresist- 

 ible fashion we cannot help supposing there is such a 

 Noumenon ; but whether a genuine Reality answers to 

 this helpless thought, there is nothing to indicate. 



There thus comes to light a more secret and more 

 deeply constitutional contradiction in this agnostic 

 scheme — the contradiction between the merely evo- 

 lutional origin of our power of thought and the reality 

 of that Unknowable from which the system derives its 

 main agnostic motif. Here we learn, if we attend to 

 what the situation means, that we cannot affirm an 

 absolute Reality and then stop short, with the result 

 of leaving it entirely vacuous and blank. If we can 

 trust our conceiving powers or our judgment in the 

 transcendent act of asserting the reality of the Nou- 

 menon, why should we be smitten with sudden dis- 

 trust of these supersensible powers when we come 

 to the problem of knowing the nature of this tran- 

 scendent Being .-' Surely there ought to be shown 

 some justification for this arrest of the transcending 

 cognition, this apparently arbitrary discrimination 

 between one of its acts and other possible similar 

 acts. It will not do to plead here that the Noumenon 



