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: Consciousness of Freedom Warranted. 125 nor out of lies,—but out of " Nature," which is but a word for the whole Sum and System of intelligible things—the embodiment of all Order, the expression of all Truth—the issue of the Fountain in which all fulness dwells. CHAPTER IV. On The Limits Of Human Knowledge. AND yet, although it is to Nature in this highest and widest sense that we belong—although it is out of this fountain that we have come, and it is out of its fulness that we have received all that we have and are, men have doubted, and will doubt again, whether we can be sure of anything concerning it. If this terrible misgiving had affected individual minds alone in moments of weariness and despair, there would have been little to say about it. Such moments may come to all of us, and the distrust which they leave behind them may be the sorest of human trials. It is no unusual result of abortive yet natural effort, and of innate yet baffled curiosity. But this doubt, which is really nothing more than a morbid effect of weakness and fatigue, has beenThe Doubt of the Agnostic. 12 7 embraced as a doctrine and systematised into a Philosophy. Nor can it be denied that there are some partial aspects of our knowledge in which its very elements seem to dissolve and disappear under the power of self-analysis, so that the sum of it is reduced to little more than a consciousness of ignorance. All that we know of Matter is so different from all that we are conscious of in Mind, that the relations between the two are really incomprehensible and inconceivable to us. Hence this relation constitutes a region of darkness in which it is easy to lose ourselves in an abyss of utter scepticism. What proof have we—it has been often asked— that the mental impressions we derive from ...