APPENDIX 403 



THE LIMITS OF KNOWLEDGE 



NOTHING is known by human beings which is not in the con- 

 sciousness of collective or individual humanity in the mind of the 

 race or of the person. 



What this means is, that man cannot get outside himself, 

 cannot leap off his own shadow, cannot obtain a conception of the 

 universe except as a mode of his own consciousness. He is man, 

 and must accept the universe as apprehended by his manhood. 



It does not therefore follow that what man knows is the 

 universe. It does not follow that man's sense and thought create 

 the outer world. It does not even follow that the laws of human 

 consciousness are the laws of Being. The utmost we are justified 

 in saying is, that man forms an integral part of the world, and that 

 his consciousness is consequently a substantial portion of the 

 whole. 



All that Philosophy can do is to analyse the mass of human 

 thoughts and feelings, to ascertain the limits within which we 

 apprehend the world, and to show the direction in which our 

 faculties may be applied. Philosophy must abandon ontological 

 explanations of the universe. These have invariably proved their 

 own futility, being successively left behind and superseded in the 

 progress of relative science, by which is meant the development of 

 human thought and knowledge about the world. 



The science of God and the science of Being, Theology and 

 Ontology, have no foundation except in the subjectivity of man. 

 Both are seen to involve impertinences, naivetes, solemn self- 

 complacences, the egotism of Narcissus doting on his own perfec- 

 tions mirrored in the darkness of the river of the universe. 



This does not preclude a sincere belief in man's power to obtain 

 partial knowledge of the world. Such knowledge, so far as it goes, 

 rests on a firm basis ; for man is, ex hypothesi, an integer in the 

 universe, and his consciousness accordingly represents a factor of 

 the universal order. The mistake of theology and ontology is to 

 transfer this partial knowledge to the account of the whole. These 

 self-styled sciences are only doing what polytheism and mythology 

 did. They are attempting to account for the whole by the experi- 

 ence of a part of it, which experience varies according to the stages 

 of the growth of the creature we call man. 



It may be demanded of me, then, why, holding these views, 



DP 2 



