24 AGNOSTICISM. 



thought-provoking- facts must be common, but they 

 will not justify the assumption of an essentially un- 

 knowable element — not unless the Ideal of complete 

 adaptation, of a completely congruous system of 

 facts be renounced as an illusion. 



Neither Is an unknowable Infinity latent In 

 thought. Our search for explanation does not go 

 on to Infinity — on the contrary, an Infinite regress of 

 reasons Is no reason at all — but only until we reach 

 some really or apparently self-evident principle. If 

 therefore our principles were always self-evident, 

 and our facts always harmonious, there would be 

 nothing to suggest a mystery beyond the actual, 

 either of knowledge or of life, no hint of an un- 

 known, and still less of an unknowable, working 

 behind the veil. If a self-evident certainty of 

 knowledge and a self-sufficing harmony of life be 

 the Ideal of our theoretic and practical activities, it 

 is clear that they have no sympathy with a restless 

 and endless striving after the Infinite. 



The infinite region of the unknowable, which is 

 supposed to border knowledge, is nothing, and can 

 gain no support from the fact that our knowledge Is, 

 like all things, limited. For as we shall see [§ 7], 

 a limit does not imply anything beyond It, and the 

 infinite is only a negation, the ideal limit of the 

 finite [cf. ch. Ix. § 3]. Hence we may console our- 

 selves with the reflection that even if a real limit 

 to knowledge existed, our thought could never dis- 

 cover its reality. It would always regard It as an 

 ideal limit, not as something beyond the known, 

 but as the illusion of the self-transcendence of 

 knowledge. 



§ 6. It has been shown then that the assertion 

 of any unknowable is self-contradictory, and that 



