70 COSMIC PHILOSOPHY. [i>t. I. 



floating in water. And in stating this, I only reveal my in- 

 capacity for conceiving that, under identical conditions, the 

 Unknowable can ever act upon human intelligence other- 

 wise than it has always acted upon it. In other words, I 

 am showing that I cannot transcend the limits of ex- 

 perience ; and I am reaffirming, in the most emphatic manner, 

 the relativity of all knowledge. 



We are now in a position to answer the queries which 

 were propounded at the beginning of this chapter. At the 

 outset of our inquiry, Truth was provisionally defined as 

 the correspondence between the subjective order of our con- 

 ceptions and the objective order of the relations among 

 things. But this is the definition 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 this 

 which Mr. Mill must have had in mind, when he let fall the 

 much criticized suggestion that in some distant planet the 

 sum of tw r o and two might be five. But such a statement is 

 inadequate ; for when we speak of planets and numbers, we 

 are tarrying within the region of things accessible to in- 

 telligence, and within this region we cannot admit the 

 possibility of two and two making five. It is nevertheless 

 imaginable that somewhere there may be a mode of existence, 

 different from intelligence, and inconceivable by us because 

 wholly alien from our experience, upon which numerical 

 limitations like ours would not be binding. The utter 

 blankness of uncertainty in which such a suggestion leaves 

 us may serve as an illustration of the theorem that we can 

 have no criterion of Absolute Truth, or of truth that is not 

 correlated with the conditions of our intelligence. 



But the lack of any such criterion in no way concerns us 

 as intelligent beings. The only truth with which we have 

 any concern is Relative Truth, — the truth that is implicated 

 With whatever can in any way come within our cognizance. 

 For relative truth our inquiry has established this criterion 



