Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 3 "Philosophical Remains" (1883 ed.).djvu/562

552 that whatever man knows he knows only in relation, that is, only in relation to his own faculties of knowledge. He can, therefore, apprehend only relative or conditioned truth. The unconditioned (truth in itself) is beyond his grasp. But it is plain that this argument proves too much; it proves that the unconditioned truth is equally beyond the grasp of Omniscience; because it is surely manifest that omniscience can know things only in relation to itself; and therefore Omniscience is just as incompetent as man is to apprehend the unconditioned, if this must be apprehended out of all relation to intelligence. If that be the idea of the unconditioned, Schelling's conception of philosophy must be given up, and Hamilton's must be accepted. But the surrender of the one and the acceptance of the other involves the admission that the truth in itself cannot be known even by the Supreme reason. That is the reductio to which Hamilton's argument brings us.

To escape this conclusion, then, we must not understand the unconditioned as that which is exempt from all relation; we must view it as that which stands in some sort of relation to intelligence. Viewing it otherwise, we fail into the absurdity touched upon in the preceding paragraph.

If the truth in itself is not to be regarded as that which is placed out of all relation to intellect, it must, no less than the other kind of truth (the unconditioned), be regarded as that which stands in some sort of relation to intellect; so that the distinction