Page:The Story of Philosophy.pdf/440

 we come upon mind and consciousness: and here are greater puzzles than before. "Ultimate scientific ideas," then, "are all representations of realities that cannot be comprehended.…In all directions the scientist's investigations bring him face to face with an insoluble enigma; and he ever more clearly perceives it to be an insoluble enigma. He learns at once the greatness and the littleness of the human intellect—its power in dealing with all that comes within the range of experience, its impotence in dealing with all that transcends experience. He, more than any other, truly knows that in its ultimate nature nothing can be known." The only honest philosophy, to use Huxley's word, is agnosticism.

The common cause of these obscurities is the relativity of all knowledge. "Thinking being relating, no thought can express more than relations.…Intellect being framed simply by and for converse with phenomena, involves us in nonsense when we try to use it for anything beyond phenomena." And yet the relative and phenomenal imply by their names and natures something beyond them, something ultimate and absolute. "On watching our thoughts we see how impossible it is to get rid of the consciousness of an Actuality lying behind Appearances, and how from this impossibility results our indestructible belief in that Actuality." But what that Actuality is we cannot know.

From this point of view the reconciliation of science and religions is no longer very difficult. "Truth generally lies in the coördination of antagonistic opinions." Let science admit that its "laws" apply only to phenomena and the relative; let religion admit that its theology is a rationalizing myth for a belief that defies conception. Let religion cease to picture the Absolute as a magnified man; much worse, as a cruel and blood-thirsty and treacherous monster, afflicted