COLLAPSE OF THE UNKNOWABLE. 25 



knowledge, no matter what Its difficulties may be, 

 can never afford any positive ground for the as- 

 sumption of an unknowable. But if agnostics per- 

 sist in their assertions as a matter of faith, without 

 having any positive basis of evidence, we may 

 request them at least to make their theory consist- 

 ent. If they gratuitously assume an unknowable, 

 they must at least purify their assumption from an 

 illusory reference to reality. If any connection with 

 the known degrades the unknowable into the known, 

 that link must be broken. The agnostics must pass 

 over for good into the region of the unknowable 

 and unthinkable, and burn their boats. They must 

 make the separation between the unknowable and 

 our real world complete, and carry it out consist- 

 ently. They must no longer be allowed to base 

 anything upon the unknowable, to make it the 

 ground of anything actual, the cause of anything 

 real, the reason of anything rational. They must 

 no longer be allowed to decorate their first principle 

 with an initial capital, for to spell it with U, is to 

 liken It to reality in the known world, to attribute 

 existence to it, to make an adjectival negation of 

 knowledge into a substantive fact ; in a word, to 

 hypostasize It. They must be prevented from say- 

 ing even that the unknowable exists, for existence 

 also is a predicate of the known world. Rigorously, 

 the only statement they can be permitted to make 

 Is, that it is unknowable, and has no connection with 

 the known. 



But this proposition would suggest nothing to our 

 minds, just as nothing can validly suggest It to them ; 

 if we could hold the self-contradictory hypothesis 

 that the unknowable existed, we should yet have to 

 admit that Its existence could never be discovered. 



