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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER HI. THE DOCTRINE OF THE RELATIVITY OF HUMAN KNOWLEDGE, AS HELD BY SIR WILLIAM HAMILTON. It is hardly possible to affirm more strongly or more explicitly than Sir W. Hamilton has done, that Things in themselves are to us altogether unknowable, and that all we can know of any thing is its relation to us, composed of, and limited to, the Phenomena which it exhibits to our organs. Let me cite a passage from one of the Appendices to the " Discussions." "Our whole knowledge of mind and of matter is relative, conditioned — relatively conditioned. Of tilings absolutely or in themselves, be they external, be they internal, we know nothing, or know them only as incognizable ; and become aware of their incomprehensible existence, only as this is indirectly and accidentally revealed to us, through certain qualities related to our faculties of knowledge, and which qualities, again, we cannot think as unconditioned, irrelative, existent in and of themselves. All that we know is therefore phaenome- nal,—phenomenal of the unknown. . . . Nor is this denied; for it has been commonly confessed, that, as substances, we know not what is Matter, and are ignorant of what is Mind." This passage might be matched by many others, equally emphatic, and in appearance equally decisive, " Discussions on Philosophy," p. 643. several of which I shall have occasion to quote. Yet in the sense which the author's phrases seem to convey — in the only substantial meaning capable of being attached to them — the doctrine they assert was certainly not held by Sir W. Hamilton. He by no means admits that we know nothing of objects, except their existence, and the impressions produced by them upon the human mind. He affirms this in regard to what have been called by metaphysicians the Secondary Q...