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Still, the farther we follow Kant in his analysis the more does the contribution to knowledge from the side of the mind tend to increase, and the more does the factor in our impressions from the side of things tend to fade away. This basis of impression being wholly unknowable is as good as non-existent for us. Yet it never actually disappears.
This idea of the unknowable is the root of all materialism; and yet no scientific man, however materialistic his proclivities, treats the unanalysable residuum thus when he meets it in the experiments of his laboratory. On the contrary, he makes this final unanalysable fact the basis of his synthesis.
Spencer has himself suggested that, since the system of synthetic philosophy begins with a division entitled the "Unknowable," having for its purpose to show that all material phenomena are manifestations of a Power which transcends our knowledge, that "force as we know it can be regarded only as a Conditioned effect of the Unconditioned Cause" there has been thereby afforded sufficiently decided proof of belief in something which cannot be held in the hands.
Do you use the old cry that all outside of matter belongs to the "unknown" and "unknowable?" Exchange the terms for the terms the "uncomprehended" and the "incomprehensible," and we will walk side by side. We know many things which we do not comprehend. Do we comprehend all that belongs to the physical sciences? Do we comprehend matter? I know that I know, but do I comprehend that knowledge?
But people did not dare change his nuptial garments, and they could not change his eyes, two dark and frightful glasses through which looked at men, the unknowable Yonder. Lazarus was not moved by the magnificence of the imperial palace.
Mansel, to prove that it is unknowable, inconceivable, unthinkable. He, however, differs from those distinguished writers in two points. While admitting that we know no more of the first cause than we do of a geometrical figure which is at once a circle and a square, yet we do know that it is actual. For this conviction we are not dependent on faith.
To-day, men who refuse Bible instruction talk of the unknown and the unknowable, thus conceding that their efforts as naturalists, or “natural men,” are not sufficient in their results to disclose the character of the great first cause. The same great failure has been, and ever will be, made by all mere naturalists.
There's not a shadow of doubt about it, the First Cause is just unknowable to us, and we'd be sorry if it wasn't. Whether it's God or the Atom. All I say is Om! The first business of every faith is to declare its ignorance. I don't know where I come from nor where I exit to. I don't know the origins of life nor the goal of death.
Further, it became the Unknowable, before which the human mind could only halt in despair. And in this way destitution arose out of ambition itself, since thought, after trusting too exclusively to its geometrical strength, was compelled at the end of its effort to confess itself beaten when confronted with the only questions to which no man may ever be indifferent.
The play is national, again, in that permanent curiosity upon knowable things nay, that mysterious half-knowledge of unknowable things which, in its last forms, produced the mystic, and which is throughout history so plainly characteristic of these Northern Atlantic islands.
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