PHILOSOPHY AS AN ORGANON 



than vain verbal wranglings ; but his ignorance 

 of psychology was so great that he probably 

 never knew, or cared to know, why it must 

 necessarily be so. Had he ever once arrived at 

 the knowledge that the process of knowing in- 

 volves the cognition of likeness, difference, and 

 relation, and that the Absolute, as presenting 

 none of these elements, is trebly unknowable, 

 he would never have confounded purely meta- 

 physical hypotheses with those which are only 

 premature but are nevertheless scientific. He 

 would have seen, for instance, that our inability 

 to say positively whether there are or are not liv- 

 ing beings on Saturn results merely from our 

 lack of sufficient data for a complete induction ; 

 whereas our inability to frame a tenable hypo- 

 thesis concerning matter -per se results from the 

 eternal fact that we can know nothing save 

 under the conditions prescribed by our mental 

 structure. Could we contrive a telescope pow- 

 erful enough to detect life, or the products of 

 art, upon a distant planet, there is nothing in 

 the constitution of our minds to prevent our 

 appropriating such knowledge ; but no patience 

 of observation or cunning of experiment can 

 ever enable us to know the merest pebble as 

 it exists out of relation to our consciousness. 

 Simple and obvious as this distinction appears, 

 there is much reason to believe that Comte 

 never understood it. He inveighs against in- 

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