THE RELATIVITY OF KNOWLEDGE.* 



As this is a Sunday evening lecture, I suppose it is proper 

 to begin with a text. I select the following, therefore : 



"And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose 

 top may reach unto heaven." Gen. xi., 4. 



The childish notion expressed in these words is to-day so 

 palpably absurd that a boy of ten years of age would laugh 

 at it, if it were seriously proposed. As transparently ridic- 

 ulous as it is in physics, the same notion is quite common 

 in philosophy. Men expect to build towers of speculation 

 whose tops can reach the Absolute. The projectors of 

 Babel's tower no more seriously hoped to touch the region 

 known as heaven than do our philosophers, who strive to 

 know things as they are in themselves, to reach the indeter- 

 minate. Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo cut away the foun- 

 dations from the earth and left it floating in the ocean of 

 immensity. Hume and Kant, Berkeley and Spencer, cut 

 away the foundations of the supposed stability of truth, 

 and left it a tiny speck amid the endless deep. A tower 

 from either foundation reaching to the infinite is simply 

 ludicrous in its absurdity. All we know or ever hope to 

 know is practically wiped out when contrasted with the in- 

 finite. Two points along any straight line that are at an 

 equal distance from any third point, and in the same direc- 

 tion, must be exactly together, and are not two points at all. 

 From our first item of knowledge to the end of endless 

 knowledge is no farther than from our last item to the same. 

 All we can grasp in thought pales into nothingness before 

 the infinite ocean of facts. If a worm cannot compass our 

 conception of the universe with its limited fund of experi- 

 ence, neither can we compass that of a being millions on 

 millions of times farther beyond us in progress than we are 

 beyond a worm. 



Natural Philosophy is steadily proving the kinship of 

 our senses of seeing, hearing, feeling, tasting and smelling. 

 * Copyright, 1889, by James H. West. 



