Page:Immediate Experience and Mediation.djvu/19

 knowledge? The 'logically - inevitable is the very antithesis of the 'externally - connected'; and the 'spatially-contiguous' (or 'continuous') is but a travesty of the 'logically-one'. A theory of reasoning which relies on such analogies stands self-condemned. We might as well base our analysis of mediation on the equally plausible, and equally barbarous, assumptions that knowledge is an 'edifice', that truth is a 'ladder', and that an argument has 'steps'.

What, then, becomes of the doctrine that 'Mediation is grounded on the Immediate'? Are there no self-evident principles of reasoning? And are there no self-evident truths in the texture of knowledge or none, at least, to guarantee our reasoning as the foundations on which it rests?

There is a sense in which every judgement is infallible. For, as Mr. F. H. Bradley has expressed it, 'we cannot, while making a judgement, entertain the possibility of its error'. But every judgement alike is thus 'infallible'; and though 'infallible', it may be erroneous, and we ourselves may come to recognize its falsity. Again, there is a sense in which all truth is selfevident. For 'truth', in Spinoza's famous saying, 'is the criterion of itself and of the false, as light reveals itself and darkness'. But to deny that truth is