1 4 INTRODUCTORY. 



It is merely the first stage In negation, and negation 

 finds no rest until it has sunk to the lowest depth. 

 And Positivism, especially, finds it very easy to pass 

 into Agnosticism, with which it Is indeed frequently 

 combined. 



§ ID. Granted, It may be said, that a knowledge 

 of God and of a future life would be of all things 

 the most desirable, of all knowledge the most pre- 

 cious, and that the search for it is irresistibly sug- 

 gested by the constitution of things. It does not 

 follow that it is also possible. It was, perhaps, a 

 well-meant deception to maintain that philosophy 

 was not needed, intended to console men for the 

 fact that it is impossible. The rejection of meta- 

 physics was put on the wrong ground : the assertion 

 that they did not exist should have been supple- 

 mented by the proof that they could not exist. The 

 consoling sophism that philosophy is a matter of 

 indifference having been falsified by the concern 

 men display about it, and the simple assertion that 

 we do not know having proved insufficient to repress 

 the pertinacious questionings of the philosopher, it 

 is now time to assert that we can not know% and to 

 exhibit the Illusoriness of metaphysics and the im- 

 possibility of answering the ultimate questions of 

 philosophy. This is the task which Agnosticism 

 sets itself to prove, and we shall consider its achieve- 

 ments in the next chapter. It will then appear that 

 it succeeds only by suggesting a doubt of the com- 

 petence of human knowledge, which cannot be con- 

 fined to the sphere in which it started. It calls up 

 Scepticism from the abyss of negation, and is ab- 

 sorbed by a greater and more powerful spirit of evil. 

 Scepticism, in its turn, can establish its case only by 

 allying itself with Pessimism, and in Pessimism the 



