Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/83

22 propagandism would imply, and which the throng of its generally intelligent but inexpert readers are prone to take for granted, the agnostic system appears to the critical student of philosophy as logically an open question at best.

The self-contradiction of agnosticism — to pass now to its second alleged defect — is a characteristic which it shares in common with other philosophies that fall short of a view completely comprehensive. The self-contradiction comes out in a peculiar way, particularly interesting for the critical history of thought. It may be made apparent as follows. The system maintains at once the two propositions, (1) that all knowledge is founded wholly on sense-perception, physical or psychic, and is consequently restricted to the objects and items of experience, that is, to phenomena merely; and (2) that the Reality beyond phenomena is nevertheless an immutable datum of consciousness, that is, an unquestionable certainty, or, in equivalent words, a matter of unqualified knowledge. In short, it is maintained that we can only know by means of sense, and yet can really know that the supersensible exists; that our cognitive powers are confined to the field of phenomena, and yet that they somehow penetrate beyond that field sufficiently to know that a Noumenon is real. We are naturally led to ask, By what strange power is this feat accomplished? — by what criterion of truth is this certainty tested? Of