Page:Journal of Speculative Philosophy Volume 17.djvu/79

70 sciousness, proves itself, I think, amply adequate. Since relativity, according to it, consists not in relation to a nervous organism, but to consciousness, the possibility of knowledge is provided for. And, on the other hand, since this self-consciousness is the ground and source of relations, it cannot be subject to them. It is itself the true Absolute, then. This does not mean that it is the Unrelated, but that it is not conditioned by those conditions which determine its objects. Thus, we are saved the absurdity of believing in a relative which has no correlate absolute.

We have thus considered the theory of the Relativity of Knowledge in that form where it unites itself with and bases itself upon feeling. The reader may see for himself how large a portion of it would also apply to any theory of the Relativity of Knowledge. In closing, we must repeat the caution with which we began: that we are not dealing with the theory of relativity of feeling as a psychological theory. The correctness of the theory is undoubted. The philosophical interpretation of it is the point in question. Its conditions and implications need development, and we have attempted to show that when they are developed the theory is compatible neither with Sensationalism, nor with Subjectivism, nor with Agnosticism; that it is compatible only with a theory which admits the constitutive power of Thought, as itself ultimate Being, determining objects.

— PRIMEVAL MAN. BY ELIZABETH PALMER PEABODT.

This paper, the résumé of some thirty years of my own studies into Historical Origins, was written as long ago as 1854; before I had read Bunsen's "Antiquarian Researches," which I found, when I did read them, in 1860, confirmed with astronomical, philological, and physiological facts, and with the ornamentation of the most ancient monuments, as well as with collation and criticism of the oldest written documents, the theory of a primeval civilization, long antedating what had been considered, hitherto, the beginning of human history.