260 COSMIC PHILOSOPnT. [pt. i. 



guish between hypotheses which are temporarily unverifiable 

 from present lack of the means of observation, and those 

 which are permanently unverifiable from the very nature of 

 the knowing process. There is no ground for supposing that 

 Comte ever thoroughly understood why we cannot know the 

 Absolute and the Infinite. He knew, as a matter of historical 

 fact, that all attempts to obtain such knowledge had miser- 

 ably failed, or ended in nothing better than vain verbal wrang- 

 lings ; but his ignorance of psychology was so great that he 

 probably never knew, or cared to know, why it must neces- 

 sarily be so. Had he ever once arrived at the kuowledge 

 that the process of knowing involves the cognition of like- 

 ness, difference, and relation, and that the Absolute, as 

 presenting none of these elements, is trebly unknowable, he 

 would never have confounded purely metaphysical hypo- 

 theses with those which are only premature but are never- 

 theless scientific. He would have seen, for instance, that our 

 inability to say positively whether there are or are not living 

 beings on Saturn results merely from our lack of sufficient 

 data for a complete induction ; whereas our inability to 

 frame a tenable hypothesis concerning matter per se results 

 from the eternal fact that we can know nothing save under 

 the conditions prescribed by our mental structure. Could 

 we contrive a telescope powerful enough to detect life, or the 

 products of art, upon a distant planet, there is nothing in the 

 constitution of our minds to prevent our appropriating such 

 knowledge ; but no patience of observation or cunning of 

 experiment can ever enable us to know the merest pebble as 

 it exists out of relation to our consciousness. Simple and 

 obvious as this distinction appears, there is much reason to 

 believe that Comte never understood it. He inveighs against 

 inquiries into the proximate origin of organic life in exactly 

 the same terms in which he condemns inquiries into the 

 ultimate origin of the universe. He could not have done 

 this had he perceived that the latter question is for ever 



