The Relativity of Knowledge. 31 



like the single octave of forks, and Nature is like the piano 

 that goes both above and below our powers. 



But while the piano itself is a finite series, and only a 

 little beyond the octave of forks, Nature is endless in her 

 range, defying our powers of imitation both upward and 

 downward. A worm, claiming to know the universe as it 

 is, becomes an edifying spectacle. A blind fish in the 

 Mammoth Cave would know the folly of the worm, al- 

 though repeating the same silliness for itself. Man can see 

 that neither the worm nor the fish can compass anything 

 like a correct conception of things as they are. The creature 

 last produced, no doubt always in the pride of its heart 

 thinks its own knowledge final, and is willing to stake 

 everything on it. A being as far beyond us as we are be- 

 yond a worm would wonder at our presumption, if made 

 aware of it. Then beings millions on millions of times 

 beyond him, along the infinite scale of impossible concep- 

 tion, would see that even his knowledge was as nothing to 

 the whole. 



From the single sense of the lowest animal, to the most 

 accurately adjusted five senses of the highest Caucasian, is 

 but a narrow step. We are not one whit nearer that end- 

 lessness of sense-potentiality here depicted for the know- 

 able than is the lowest creature that lives and breathes. 

 Its knowledge of the actual state of the heart of things is 

 as great as ours. It is as near the final synthesis of the 

 awful abyss of endless fact as we are or ever shall be^ 

 though we may go on trying to approach it forever and 

 forever. Science may explain and explain, yet, after all, 

 what do her explanations amount to, before this awful 

 problem that our conceit thinks it has solved ? Physics 

 and chemistry, biology and astronomy, are all vying with 

 each other in trying to explain all things as modes of 

 motion. 



Our friend Mr. Perrin has taken this cue, and worked 

 out a philosophy where everything is knowable.* He asks 

 us if motion is not the final fact of experience ; if all facts 

 are not at last resolvable into facts of motion. Well, 

 what if this be so ? Suppose we can show that we have 

 no evidence of the existence of motion ? Even if we 

 acknowledge that things do actually move, instead of 

 merely appearing to do so, we can still ask him to tell us 



*The Religion of Philosophy. By Raymond S. Perrin. 



