Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/195

158 that the relation expresses? For instance, let the relation R be the causal relation. You know, by hypothesis, what causation means. Surely this implies that in your experience you have already met, or could meet, with cases of what you would recognise as causal relation; and that wherever a causal relation exists, it is like in its nature to what you experience, or get presented to your intelligence, when you know particular instances of causation. The causal relation, if thus clear to you, is ipso facto clear to you as something that could be instanced, presented, and comprehended in a possible experience. So too with any other relation whose nature is now clear to you. Now, if this be true, how can p, which is a fact of experience, be viewed as standing in a certain relation R (which also is, by hypothesis, a fact of a possible experience) to something, x, whose very nature is that it is no fact of any possible experience, being a reality that is utterly transcendent? This is as if you should say: “I know quantities, ɑ, b, c, etc.; and I know a relation R, viz., that of equality. Hereupon, however, I declare that a, or b, or c, stands in this known relation R, viz., in the relation of equality, to a certain x which is expressly defined as something which is no quantity at all.” This would be absurd. It is precisely as absurd to say: Contents of experience stand in a known and clear relation, that itself is, as such, an object of possible experience, to something that is to be expressly defined as no object of any possible experience whatever. If the relation is, as such, an object of a possible experience, then its terms are so too.