irremoveably to truth’s proper character. Still the difference drawn between absolute and finite truth must none the less be upheld. For the former, in a word, is not intellectually corrigible. There is no intellectual alteration which could possibly, as general truth, bring it nearer to ultimate Reality. We have seen that any suggestion of this kind is but self-destructive, that any doubt on this point is literally senseless. Absolute truth is corrected only by passing outside the intellect. It is modified only by taking in the remaining aspects of experience. But in this passage the proper nature of truth is, of course, transformed and perishes.
Any finite truth, on the other side, remains subject to intellectual correction. It is incomplete not merely as being confined by its general nature, as truth, within one partial aspect of the Whole. It is incomplete as having within its own intellectual world a space falling outside it. There is truth, actual or possible, which is over against it, and which can stand outside it as an Other. But with absolute truth there is no intellectual outside. There is no competing predicate which could conceivably qualify its subject, and which could come in to condition and to limit its assertion. Absolute knowledge may be conditional, if you please; but its condition is not any other truth, whether actual or possible.
The doctrine, which I am endeavouring to state, is really simple. Truth is one aspect of experience, and is therefore made imperfect and limited by what it fails to include. So far as it is absolute, it does however give the general type and character of all that possibly can be true or real. And the universe in this general character is known completely. It is not known, and it never can be known, in all its details. It is not known, and it never, as a whole, can be known, in such a sense that knowledge would be the same as experience or reality.
