phenomenal manifestations of final reality into this reality, we find it necessary to express it by the aid of symbols which the phenomena furnish us."
But under these conditions the error of Spencer and of all the agnostics has been precisely that of attempting to fix the limits of the known and the unknown, and of specifying absolutely what should be assumed to be unknowable.[1]
Generally, all our sensations are derived from the senses, and through these all our ideas, all our concepts. It follows that all the properties of bodies are known to us as necessarily limited and conditioned as they are in reality. The same is true of the perceptions registered by the special organs of sense which contribute to the formation of our knowledge. The associations of ideas and feelings, also, conform to this same law of limitation which also dominates our largest generalizations and our highest abstractions. Space, time, movement, matter, whether in their largest or smallest dimensions, are inaccessible to our intelligence. We do not know them scientifically except as limited, and they are not otherwise in reality. Our capacity of knowing is a relative capacity to the subject and the object, a limited capacity. Space signifies only the difference of the situation of bodies. Time is their difference of succession. Matter is their difference of combination. Movement is the variety of changes which occur among them. We cannot form an idea of any portion of space or of time without thinking of space and time which is exterior to the same in the case of space and anterior or posterior in the case of time. Time itself serves as the measure of space and space as a measure of time. Space and time, at once finite and infinite, are therefore necessary conditions of our observations and of all our knowledge.
The only limits, finite or infinite, which we can assign to time, space, matter, or force are those of our sensibilities and of our perceptions. Experience parallel with the development of our organs and of our sensibility, has permitted us with the
- ↑ On the theory of the unknowable see the two chapters devoted by M. A. Fouillet to the objective and the subjective limits of science, pp. 3-28 in his book, Le mouvement idealiste; also my study of L'inconnaissance dans problèmes de philosophic positive; Paris: Schleicher frères, 1900.
