Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/59

22 lar doctrine of the Unknowable Reality uses this so-called “verdict of science” only by confounding it with a totally different assertion. The “verdict of science” is that organised experience indicates much phenomenal truth that the senses can never directly catch. The doctrine of the Unknowable Reality asserts that no human experience can attain any genuine truth, and then appeals to that aforesaid “verdict” to prove this result. But the sciences judge the ignorance of sense by comparing it with a knowledge conceived to be actually attained; namely, the knowledge of certain indirectly known physical phenomena as they really are, not to be sure as absolute realities, but as the objects of our organised physical experience. You surely cannot use the proposition that organised experience is wiser than passing experience, to prove that no experience can give us any true wisdom.

Yet I said, a moment ago, that this popular conception of the nature of our human ignorance contains — or, rather, conceals — much truth. And this notion of the relative failure of every sort of merely immediate experience to reveal a truth at which it kindly hints, is a very instructive notion. Only, we plainly need to try a second time to define the nature of human ignorance, in terms of this very contrast