Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/76

Rh itself, when those of the agnostic party go on to declare that the Reality beyond phenomena — which they insist exists as an “immutable datum of consciousness” — must be regarded as permanently the Unknowable. The dispute gets to its keenest when they base this agnostic dogma on the claim that nothing deserving the name of knowledge is attainable in any way except the method of natural science. To this extravagant estimate of scientific method, to the superficial philosophy of this method which it implies, and to the consequent construing of the Noumenon as unknowable, the pantheistic idealists demur, and go on to vindicate the complete knowableness of the Reality at the basis of experience by attempting to show Reason itself to be that Reality, which as perfectly self-knowing must be perfectly knowable to reason in men. The issue thus becomes implacable between the agnostics and these affirmative idealists; and it is only just to say that in the demurrer to the overestimate of natural science and its method, in the criticism of the shallow analysis of the method, and in the protest against the finality of agnosticism, historic philosophy sides with these quasi-theists. The agnostic position, the largest historic view of philosophy would say, is an unwarrantable arrest of the philosophic movement of reason; and its unjustifiable character appears in the fact, which can clearly be