ch. iv.] PHENOMENON AND NOUMENON. 81 



taste, hearing, and muscular sensibility, all these qualities 

 would cease to exist, and therefore the tree would cease to be 

 tree. But it does not follow that the Unknown Eeality 

 which caused in us these groups of sensations has ceased to 

 exist. Our ineradicable belief is that it still exists, and 

 would assume the qualities which constitute tree as soon as 

 our capacity of sensation were restored. And we recognize, 

 as in accordance with the dictates of common-sense, the sug- 

 gestion that if some Being with seventy senses, like the 

 denizen of the planet Saturn in Voltaire's inimitable satire, 

 were to come into the presence of this same Unknown 

 Eeality, there would undoubtedly arise in this Being the 

 consciousness of a congeries of qualities different from that 

 which constitutes tree. We further recognize that if this 

 Being were endowed with some mode of impressibility so 

 different from ours that the name " intelligence " would not 

 apply to it, this same Unknown Eeality might generate in 

 such a Being some state or states wholly different from what 

 we know as the cognition of a material object. I say, we 

 regard these conclusions as consistent with that extended 

 and systematized common-sense which is called science. In 

 stating them, we assert, to the fullest extent to which the 

 exigencies of human language will admit of our asserting it, 

 the relativity of all knowledge ; and we admit everything 

 which the idealists have established upon the sound basis of 

 psychologic induction. What we refuse to admit is the legi- 

 timacy of the idealist's inference that the Unknown Eeality 

 beyond consciousness does not exist. We assert, on the con- 

 trary, that the doctrine of relativity cannot even be intel- 

 ligibly stated without postulating the existence of this Un- 

 known Eeality, which is independent of us. The proposition 

 that the tree or the mountain exists as tree or mountain only 

 in so far as it is cognized, becomes utter nonsense when we 

 seek to suppress the conception of a persistent Something 

 which becomes tree or mountain in being cognized. 

 vol. I. a 



