universe of God." The "as it were" and these metaphors of "spheres intruding themselves," etc., and such like, perhaps unavoidable, spatial figures leave one in some doubt how far the expressions are meant to be taken literally. I do not see how there can be any such thing as knowledge at all, unless the world of my consciousness is not a closed sphere, and unless the real world, quâ real, does intrude itself into that sphere. When I know anything, the sphere of my consciousness does lay hold with its hands (the metaphor is not mine) upon a real object: otherwise I do not know that thing, but am under an illusion that I do so. If the sphere of my consciousness insists on keeping its hands in its pockets and its mouth shut, it will inevitably find its inside empty. That we never know the real world, quâ real, is an odd formula for what calls itself epistemological realism. If "quâ real" means "quâ thing-in-itself" the statement is indeed an identical proposition: we cannot know what we cannot know. But if our knowledge is of ideas of things, and never of real things, the logical conclusion is the sceptical conclusion of Hume, and certainly not any doctrine that can claim kinship with the beliefs of the ordinary man. To sum up, the two closed spheres, in the only sense in which they have any meaning that I can understand, seem to me two opposite abstractions. On the one side there are the states of consciousness minus the content of these states; on the other, objects of possible knowledge (unless I am to say, of impossible knowledge—if 'things-in-themselves' be meant) minus the subject which makes them objects of possible knowledge. That these two abstractions exclude one another may readily be admitted (apart from the difficulty that in psychology the states of consciousness minus their content are just the objects of possible knowledge which the psychologist, as such, treats in abstraction from the conditions under which they are objects). But the statement seems to me irrelevant in epistemology—a science which prefers to deal with the conditions of knowledge.
Epistemology is nothing but a part of Logic. It is only because of the wretchedly limited sense in which the term
