knowledge falls? Even if relations are taken to exist somehow outside of the Many, the attempt to make knowledge fall merely in these relations leads to insoluble difficulties. And here, since the Many are taken to be the sole reality, such an attempt at escape is precluded. The knowledge therefore must fall somehow within the reals.
Now if the knowledge of each singly fell in each severally, each for itself would be the world, and there could nowhere be any knowledge of the many reals. But if, one or more, they know the others, such knowledge must qualify them necessarily, and it must qualify them reciprocally by the nature both of the known and of the knower. The knowledge in each knower—even if we abstract from what is known—seems an internal change supervening if not superinduced, and it is a change which cannot well be explained, given complete self-containedness. It involves certainly an alteration of the knower, and an alteration such as we cannot account for by any internal cause, and which therefore is an argument against, though it cannot disprove, mere self-existence. And in the second place, when we consider knowledge from the side of the known, this disproof seems complete. Knowledge apart from the known is a one-sided and inconsistent abstraction, and the assertion of a knowledge in which the known is not somehow and to some extent present and concerned, seems no knowledge at all. But such presence implies alteration and relativity in both knower and known. And it is in the end idle to strive to divide the being of the known, and to set up there a being-in-itself which remains outside and is independent of knowledge. For the being-in-itself of the known, if it were not itself experienced and known, would for the knower be nothing and could not possibly be asserted. Any knowledge which (wrongly) seems to fall outside of and to make no difference to the known, could in any case not be ultimate. It must rest on and pre-suppose a known the essence of which consists in being experienced, and which outside of knowledge is nothing. But, if so, the nature of the known must depend on the knower, just as the knower is qualified by the nature of the known. Each is relative and neither is self-contained, and otherwise knowledge, pre-supposed as a fact, is made impossible.
Suppose, in other words, that each of the Many could possess an existence merely for itself, that existence could not be known, and for the others would be nothing. But when one real becomes something for another, that makes a change in the being of each. For the relation, I presume, is an alteration of something, and there is by the hypothesis nothing else but the Many of which it could be the alteration. The knower is evidently and plainly altered; and, as to the known, if it remained unchanged, it would itself remain outside of the
