COSMIC PHILOSOPHY 



some form of impressibility quite different from 

 what we know as conscious intelligence, the 

 same unknown reality might be manifested as 

 something quite different from iron or water, 

 sinking or floating. By my statement I only 

 imply that whenever that same unknown thing, 

 or things, acts upon my consciousness, or upon 

 the consciousness of any being of whom intelli- 

 gence can be properly predicated, there will 

 always ensue the perception of iron sinking in 

 water, and never the perception of iron float- 

 ing in water. And in stating this, I only reveal 

 my incapacity for conceiving that, under iden- 

 tical conditions, the Unknowable can ever act 

 upon human intelligence otherwise than it has 

 always acted upon it. In other words, I am 

 showing that I cannot transcend the limits of 

 experience ; and I am reaffirming, in the most 

 emphatic manner, the relativity of all know- 

 ledge. 



We are now in a position to answer the 

 queries which were propounded at the begin- 

 ning of this chapter. At the outset of our in- 

 quiry. Truth was provisionally defined as the 

 correspondence between the subjective order of 

 our conceptions and the objective order of the 

 relations among things. But this is the defini- 

 tion of that Absolute Truth, which implies an 

 experience of the objective order in itself, and 

 of such truth we can have no criterion. It was 



I02 



