Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/77

16 shown, that it involves at once a petitio and a self-contradiction.

This largest philosophy would no doubt also convict pantheistic idealism of an undue arrest of reason; but its first concern is to approve the protest of this form of idealism against the assault on the power of reason to reach absolute reality. It approves, too, when this idealism criticises the agnostic interpretation of the method of science, as a shallow analysis of what the method presupposes. Still, its condemnation of pantheism, even when pantheism is idealistic, is unyielding, and renders its discredit of the logic employed by agnosticism only the more inexorable. Its justification in both of these adverse judgments will be our main occupation for the rest of this essay, but our first attention must go to what it declares against agnostic evolutionism. And let us turn, first of all, to the proof that this agnosticism, as just alleged, involves a self-contradiction and a begging of the question.

If it were indubitable that we can only know what our inner and outer senses tell us, — only the facts of present and past experience, — then “it needs must follow as the night the day” that we can know only phenomena, and that the noumenal Reality behind phenomena must remain forever unknowable. But to say, even with deep Tennyson (God save the mark!), that “we have but faith,” that “we cannot know,” that