92 COSMIC PHILOSOPHY. [pt. l 



like ITegel, 1 do Dot scruple to hurl their anathemas in the 

 face of physical science itself. It is none the less quite 

 possible for the doctrine to be at the same time explicitly 

 asserted and implicitly ignored. Berkeley and Hume, Kant 

 and Hamilton, and Comte, have one and all asserted the 

 relativity of knowledge and the vanity of ontological 

 speculation. But our philosophy is not that of Kant, or 

 Hamilton, or Berkeley, or Hume, or Comte. It is not the 

 philosophy of Kant, for it denies tliat we can have any 

 criterion of truth save that which is furnished by perfect 

 congruity of experience. At the same time it differs in 

 many respects from the experience-philosophy which is 

 associated with the name of Locke ; since it denies that 

 the subject is the passive recipient of effects wrought by 

 the object, and, accepting the Leibnitzian view that the 

 subject actively cooperates with the object in each act of 

 cognition, it grounds upon this very fact its doctrine of the 

 relativity of knowledge. In its criterion of truth also it 

 differs from the experience-philosophy of Locke and Hume 

 as represented to-day by Mr. Mill ; for it finds its criterion 

 of truth in that indissoluble coherence among inner pheno- 

 mena, which, in accordance with the postulate that all 

 knowledge is the pioduct of experience, must have been 

 generated by an equally indissoluble coherence among outer 

 phenomena. Thus, too, it avoids the empiricism which has 

 in too many ways hampered the Lockian philosophy : for 

 it keeps clear of the misconception that all truths are 

 susceptible of logical demonstration, and recognizes the 

 fact that at the bottom of all proof there must be an 



1 Even Hegel, indeed, in the following passage, admits the impossibility 

 of knowing things in themselves: — "Das Diwiansich als solches ist nicht 

 Anderes als die leere Abstraction, von dem man allerdings nichts wissen kann, 

 eben daran vveil es die Abstraction von aller Bestimmung sein soil." — 

 Logik, ii. 127. The admission, however, is in Hegel's case utterly fruit- 

 less, since he falls into the same inconsistency as Kant, maintaining that we 

 have a test of truth independent of experience, and thus setting up the 

 Subjective Method, as will appear in the next chapter. 



