a metaphysic, nor an epistemology, nor a psychology, but merely a blind faith, which is a faith in the unfathomable mystery of what for us is pure Nothing.
It is held, then, that we can have no knowledge of God as he really is: we know only ourselves, or beings of like nature with ourselves, and God is infinitely more than we know ourselves to be. We do, indeed, know God in his 'manifestations,' and these enable us in a sense to apprehend his 'essence.' It is thus that we come to believe that the world is constructed on a rational plan; but this belief is not properly speaking knowledge, but merely faith, assurance or conviction. For, as the time-process of the finite world is the only reality we can be said to know, we can never escape from the limitations of our knowledge. "The truth" is "for God alone." Shut out from a knowledge of God, we are compelled to figure Him to ourselves by the highest symbol we have, the symbol of self-consciousness. Similarly, when we predicate 'eternity' of Him, we must recognize how inadequate such a symbol is to express his real nature.[1]
1. There can be no doubt, I think, that Mr. Seth denies that we can, properly speaking, have a knowledge of God as he really is. Did this merely mean that our knowledge of God is incomplete, the assertion is one which probably no one would dispute; but neither would there in that case be any reason to limit the assertion to our knowledge of God, for all our knowledge must be incomplete. The whole tenor of
- ↑ "God may, nay must, be infinitely more … than we know ourselves to be": 224 (235). "God's being may infinitely transcend His manifestations as known to us": 223 (235). "We may be said to know God as manifested in nature and history. Knowledge of the manifestation is … knowledge of the essence: it does not cut us off from knowledge of the essence, as the Relativists would have us believe": 223 (234). "The world gives evidence of being constructed on a rational plan": 124 (131). "The truth … is reserved for God alone": 213 (223). "A real self-consciousness in God seems demanded of us if we are not to be unfaithful to the fundamental principle of the theory of knowledge interpretation by the highest category within our reach": 223 (235). "Only an abstraction can properly be spoken of as out of time; so far as the Ego is real, it is not out of time, but abides or persists through time. Even in speaking of the Divine Being, that is the only sense which the 'eternal' can bear to us": 225 (236).
