FUNDAMENTAL ASSUMPTIONS OV AGNOSTICISM EXAMINED. 179 



which is altogether ignored in the Agnostic application of 

 them, and which I shall now endeavour to render evident. 



Let all material of thought be for the moment put out of 

 view but such as can be in some way or other imagined, that 

 is to say, mentally represented as having a sensible existence ; 

 and let it be assumed that the relations perceived are those 

 in which phenomena successively appear, these relations being 

 simply laws of association and sequence, and their discovery, 

 therefore, being arrived at in the process of Induction. That 

 the kind of knowledge thus obtained is, and ever will be, 

 indispensable to mortal man, — that it is the knowledge of laws 

 of which not one jot or one tittle can be safely set at nought, — 

 no person who understands what he would be saying would 

 so much as think of denying. Yet no bari'iers are less 

 respected than the bounds by which this kind of knowledge is 

 circumscribed. In the thoughts that prove mightiest in 

 stirring men's blood and determining the course of human 

 affairs they are boldly overleaped ; in ordinary human speech 

 they are utterly ignored. Induction discloses no necessity 

 for assigning to categories essentially distinct the manifesta- 

 tions of extension, tangibility, colour, odour, and taste, on the 

 one hand, and those of sense, consciousness, intellect, senti- 

 ment, and will, on the other : so far as it is concerned, the 

 attributes thus diversely grouped may be but various proper- 

 ties of one and the same thing. Induction, in its classifications, 

 knows nothing of specific subjects of attributes. The existence 

 of substance being assumed. Induction acquiesces, tacitly allows 

 that there is something, but takes no account of it, and never 

 recognises causes otherwise than as conditioning antecedents. 

 The Inductive method is not, indeed, on these grounds de- 

 spised ; but in vain is any exclusive claim set up on its behalf: 

 the common sense of mankind stubbornly withholds its sanction 

 from all such attempted delimitations of the domain of know- 

 ledge, and, in conjunction with the religious sentiment which 

 sees in Agnosticism a fatal concession to the demands of an 

 aggressive Atheism, it refuses to cede an inch of the territory 

 it claimed from the beginning. 



If, however, the question be referred to the arbitrament of 

 a truly comprehensive and profound philosophy, what must 

 the decision be ? Whether or not it be allowable to assume 

 that the relations in which phenomena successively present 

 themselves to the intellect have their ground in objectively 

 real successions, and actually constitute in an objectively real 

 space what may be called the links of a chain, one thing is 

 certain, a succession or chain of some kind or other is under 



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