tion is an instance of a tendency against which we are
required to be perpetually on our guard. The final aim of all science
and of all philosophy is to find some unity or unities that shall
co-ordinate the immense complexity of the world in which we live. Now
there is one and only one legitimate way of attaining this aim, and that
is by patient, persevering study of the facts. But the facts turn out to
be so numerous, so multifarious, that not one life nor one generation
but many lives and many generations will assuredly not co-ordinate them
sufficiently to bring this aim within probable reach. Hence the
incessant temptation, first, to supply by hypothesis what cannot yet be
obtained by observation, and, secondly, to bend facts to suit this
hypothesis; and, if the framing of such hypotheses be legitimate, the
distortion of facts is clearly not legitimate. It seems too long to wait
for future ages to complete the task. We must in some sort complete it
now; and for that purpose if the facts as we observe them will not suit,
we must substitute other facts that will. Accordingly every doctrine
must be made complete, and to make this doctrine of the relativity of
knowledge complete, we must get rid of all exceptions. But there is one
exception that we cannot get rid of, and that is the conviction of our
own identity through all changes through which we pass. Every man
amongst us passes through incessant changes. His body changes; he may
even lose parts of it altogether; he may lose all control over some of
his limbs, or over them all. And there are internal as well as external
changes in each man. His affections change, his practices, his passions,
his resolutions, his purposes, his judgments; everything possibly by
which he knows his own character. But through all these changes he is
conscious of being still one and the same self. And he knows this; and
knows it, not as an inference from any observation of sense external or
internal, but directly and intuitively. All other knowledge may
conceivably be relative, a knowledge of things as they appear, not of
things in themselves. But this is not; it is a knowledge of a thing as
it is in itself; for amidst all changes in the phenomena of each man's
nature, this still remains absolutely unchanged. We do speak of sameness
in application to phenomena; we say this is the same colour as that;
this is the same musical note as that; this is the same sensation as
that. But here we mean