June, 1890. 
CONSTANCE C. W. NADEN. 
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unknowable Pseudo-Deity. Each sentient unit is thus 
monarchos and autocrat of all it surveys. 
All impious presumption—a term Socrates applied to 
the astronomers of his own time—is eliminated from this 
Promethean and Titanic escalade—Heaven itself, like 
all things or nothings else, being but ideal, i.e., a physi¬ 
ological state—an internal feeling, not an external “reality” 
—when we limit our faculties to phenomena or appear¬ 
ances. Indeed, the charge of presumption recoils on 
our gainsayers. A world-scheme based on the relativity or 
plienomenality (by synecdoche) of cognition is the really 
humble view, confining, as it does, human knowledge within 
its legitimate boundaries, but as a set-off— the gain being 
incommensurably greater than the apparent loss —making man 
supreme in that his only proper sphere. The real presump¬ 
tion clings thus to the Spiritualists, who seek to know, and 
assume to know, the unknowable and unverifiable. To 
search after the unsearchable, with which we have no real 
concern whatsoever, is self-evidently “vanity of vanities.” 
It is like the futile efforts of the infant in arms to clutch the 
moon, or like attempting to jump down our own throat, out 
of our own skin, or to run from our own shadow. The real 
humility is to foreclose all pretensions to reach vera causes as 
entirely beyond the necessary limitations of the human mind 
(brain), and to rest content in the relativity of all Gnosis. 
In modern times Bishop Berkeley’s Principles of Human 
Knowledge is the rechauffe of the Abderite sophist’s standpoint, 
as Spinoza’s Pantheism of the later Platonist Theocles, only 
the former, vitiated by the dual fallacy of the Absolute, from 
which Animism or Fetichism—a vicious relic from primeval 
medicine men—the Greek hylo-zoists who preceded Plato 
were exempt. Our Christian and episcopal Protagoras enun¬ 
ciates his “Principle” thus: “Some truths there are so 
near and obvious to the mind that a man has only to open 
his eyes to see them. Such I take to be this most important 
one, that all the choir of Heaven and furniture of earth—in 
a word, all those bodies which compose this mighty frame of 
the world, have not any substance without a mind.” This 
position, unlike Mr. Gladstone’s “ Bock of Holy Scripture,” 
is impregnable. But, since out of our own cerebration we can 
never expatiate, that pseudo-alien mind can be no other than 
our own —the “ unknown” Cause of Causes, therefore, which 
we blindly “ seek after,” and when hypothetically “found” 
assume to worship, being impossibly any other “ making for 
righteousness,” or the reverse, than the Pseudo-Deus-Homo, 
Ego, or Demiurge, our Very Self of Very Self. In a tract 
