The Relativity of Knowledge. 41 



a ton. Taken to a star a thousand times larger than Sol, 

 it would weigh 1,000 tons. Taken oft" into the depths of 

 space far from any matter, it Avould gradually get less and 

 less in weight, down to the minutest fraction of a grain. 

 What is its absolute weight ? Has it any ? Its mass, its 

 form, and all its properties which we knoAV, belong only to 

 its relations in the same manner. In itself it has none of 

 them. 



Absolute truth is hidden from us at every turn and in 

 every place. To us things are true or false, right or wrong, 

 good or evil according as they relate themselves to our 

 understanding. To say whether a thing is true or not we 

 must know its relations. Principles and ideas are true or 

 false according to the standpoint we take in viewing them. 

 Men may positively contradict each other, and both be true 

 and right. In the illustration already given, the man walk- 

 ing toward the stern in the steamboat bound for Xew York, 

 can honestly maintain that he is going eastward at the rate 

 of three miles an hour, while a more far-seeing traveling 

 companion contradicts him, and says he is not going east- 

 ward but westward, and not going three miles an hour but 

 twenty-seven miles an hour. A still more far-seeing gentle- 

 man can honestly and truly contradict both, and assert that 

 the walker is right in saying he is going eastward, but 

 wrong in saying his speed is only three miles an hour ; for 

 it is over 900 miles an hour. Unless all of them can keep 

 their tempers, and lionestly try to find out what the others 

 mean, each will conclude that the others are either fools or 

 stubborn knaves. The zeal that kills, punishes, and hates 

 one's fellows, because they disagree with us, is born of the 

 belief that man can possess absolute and unchangeable knowl- 

 edge. To the zealot, a thing is either true or false, always and 

 under all circumstances. He cannot see that the highest 

 truth is only the last point to which our minds have shifted 

 along a contradictory line. Everything we call truth is 

 only tentative. It is the synthesis of all the facts we have 

 mastered. Additional facts will carry us beyond, to a 

 point that will make our last belief appear a falsehood. 

 Certain things are good and true to our present form of 

 civilization. Change this form, and good becomes bad, 

 right wrong, and truth error. Within this civilization, and 

 harmonic with its structure, there are truths that are now 

 and to us positively true. Change the civilization, and 



