Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 12.djvu/576

 PLACE OF HYPOTHESIS IN EXPEKIMENTAL SCIENCE. 563 ence. It is idle to assert that existence as absolute is totally different from existence as relative ; for that is merely to admit that your system is based upon an equivocation. Existence, like every other term, denotes an idea, and as such its import is relative to consciousness. You will not assert that the existence of a cognition is anything more than its being known. To assert then that that which is neither known nor knowable exists is simply to contradict yourself. You claim, in fact, to transcend consciousness, and though experience may, consciousness cannot, be transcended. If we could know that the unknowable exists, we should as surely transcend consciousness as if we knew exactly how it exists. You have no logical alternative but either to deny existence to consciousness or to admit that the unknowable does not exist. As matters stand, you are cheating your- self with an abstraction.' In truth it is not the metaphysician who seeks to transcend consciousness, but the scientific or quasi-scientific thinkers, who cannot see that a term is none the less relative that it is abstract, who surrender to the idealist the concrete world of perception and imagination only to mistake for things in themselves those ideas which of all others are the most attenuated, the nearest to insignificance. The metaphysician, however, in holding by the doctrine that existence is limited by consciousness, does not mean to deny the existence of the objective universe which science postulates. It is his proper problem to reconcile physics and idealism a problem which I must content myself on this occasion with thus barely indicating.