Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/60

Rh between a lower and a higher sort of experience. Let us begin anew our analysis of this same significant problem of the nature and limits of knowledge.

The fortune of our empirical science has been, that as we men have wrought together upon the data of our senses, we have gradually woven a vast web of what we call relatively connected, united, or organised knowledge. It is of this world, in its contrast with the world of our sensations, that I have just been speaking. Now, as we have just seen, this organised knowledge has a very curious relation to our more direct experience. In the first place, wherever this organised knowledge seems best developed, we find it undertaking to deal with a world of truth, of so-called reality, or at least of apparent truth and reality, which is very remote from the actual sensory data that any man of us has ever beheld. Our organised science, as many have pointed out ever since Plato’s first naïve but permanently important observations upon this topic, deals very largely with conceived — with ideal — realities, that transcend actual human observation. Atoms, ether-waves, geological periods, processes of evolution, — these are to-day some of the most important constituents of our conceived phenomenal universe. Spatial relations, far more exactly describable than they are directly verifiable, mathematical formulae that express again the exactly describable aspects of vast physical processes of change, — such are the topics with which our exacter science is most immediately concerned. In whose sensory experience are such objects and relationships at all directly pictured? The ideal world