178 REV. H. J. CLARKE. 



most abstract description : they may be those purely intel- 

 lectual results of comparison m which nothing is taken into 

 account but position, form_, magnitude, and number ; or they 

 may be hypothetical, or even arbitrarily imagined entities. 

 Yet, in so far as they have inter-relations, a true perception of 

 these constitutes knowledge. The concept embodied in this 

 definition must needs be admitted as a genuine and pertinent 

 outcome of the act of intellectual perception ; and my 

 designation of it will, it may be presumed, be accepted, unless 

 some distinct and intelligible concept can be formed which 

 may seem to have a better claim to the term I have adopted. 

 Knowledge, then, conceived as a possession of the human 

 mind, is neither more nor less than an accurate perception of 

 relations ; and its reality in any department of speculation or 

 inquiry is evidently independent of its value. 



Now experience, so far as its human subject takes 

 cognizance of his own, is always found to be undergoing 

 change. It is possessed in perception in successive phases, 

 undefinably complex and indicative of measureless scope for 

 intellectual operation, both analytic and synthetic. But 

 expectations excited by a recurrence of the same associations, 

 or, indeed, any symptoms of a tendency to ascribe to it 

 significance and purpose, pre-suppose that the relations noted 

 are assumed to be relations of condition; and by the per- 

 ception of these scientific investigation is rendered possible 

 and its course determined. The eai'liest differentia which 

 the intellect apprehends, as it emerges from the subjective 

 chaos whence all knowledge must of necessity take its 

 departure, is that which the term Order denotes. By 

 degrees the percipient subject, realising that he has his 

 place in a dynamical system of indefinite extent, in which he 

 contributes to the movements of the whole in the reactions of 

 a personal will of controlled and limited power, acquaints 

 himself, in proportion as he duly exercises his mental faculties, 

 with conditions or laws of sequence and association, thus 

 making progress in the acquisition of more or less useful 

 knowledge. 



Up to this point, so far as I am aware, I have not only 

 confined my assertions within the bounds imposed by the 

 Agnostic creed, but I have freely and fairly laid down the 

 principles which constitute what may appear to be its 

 metaphysical basis. This I have done to the full extent to 

 which, so far as I can discover, the doctrine seems to find 

 support in metaphysically accurate conceptions. But the 

 principles I have enunciated have a philosophical import 



