Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/78

Rh “knowledge is of things we see,” is to dogmatise in the very premises of the debate, and to raid upon the central matter at issue. The question whether we have not some knowledge independent of any and all experience — whether there must not, unavoidably, be some knowledge a priori, some knowledge which we come at simply by virtue of our nature — is really the paramount question, around which the whole conflict in philosophy concentrates, and on the decision of which the settlement of every other question hangs. To cast the career of a philosophy upon a negative answer to it, as if this were a matter of course, — which the English school from Hobbes onward has continually done, — is to proceed not only upon a petitio, but upon a delusion regarding the security of the road.

This placid and complacent delusion might far more fitly be called an ignoratio elenchi — an “overlooking of the thumbscrew” — than the fallacy which actually has that name; for those who entertain it are blind to the snare laid for them in the very structure of that experience on which they build their doctrine, and risk unawares the thumbscrew prepared by Kant. He suggested that experience may be not at all simple, but always complex, so that the very possibility of the experience which seems to the empiricist the absolute foundation of knowledge may depend on the presence in it of a factor that will