Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/85

24 and are unable to tell whether the thinking means anything more than its own occurrence, or not? Construed with rigorous consistency, then, the existence of a noumenal Unknowable as “an immutable datum of consciousness” turns out to mean nothing but this: That our conceptions are built for us in such irresistible fashion we cannot help supposing there is such a Noumenon; but whether a genuine Reality answers to this helpless thought, there is nothing to indicate.

There thus comes to light a more secret and more deeply constitutional contradiction in this agnostic scheme — the contradiction between the merely evolutional origin of our power of thought and the reality of that Unknowable from which the system derives its main agnostic motif. Here we learn, if we attend to what the situation means, that we cannot affirm an absolute Reality and then stop short, with the result of leaving it entirely vacuous and blank. If we can trust our conceiving powers or our judgment in the transcendent act of asserting the reality of the Noumenon, why should we be smitten with sudden distrust of these supersensible powers when we come to the problem of knowing the nature of this transcendent Being? Surely there ought to be shown some justification for this arrest of the transcending cognition, this apparently arbitrary discrimination between one of its acts and other possible similar acts. It will not do to plead here that the Noumenon