modern philosophy turns." Educated opinion in our day has lost its
naive trust in itself. "The natural belief of man, it is true, ever
gives the lie" to the doctrine that we do not know things. "In common
life," adds Hegel, "we reflect without particularly noting that this is
the process of arriving at the truth, and we think without hesitation
and in the firm belief that thought coincides with things."[A] But, as
soon as attention is directed to the process of thinking, and to the way
in which the process affects our consciousness of the object, it is at
once concluded that thought will never reach reality, that things are
not given to us as they are, but distorted by the medium of sense and
our intelligence, through which they pass. The doctrine of the
relativity of knowledge is thus very generally regarded as equivalent to
the doctrine that there is no true knowledge whatsoever. We know only
phenomena, or appearances; and it is these, and not veritable facts,
that we systematize into sciences. "We can arrange the appearances--the
shadows of our cave--and that, for the practical purposes of the cave,
is all that we require."[B] Not even "earth's least atom" can ever be
known to us as it really is; it is for us, at the best,

[Footnote A: Wallace's _Translation of Hegel's Logic_, p. 36.]

[Footnote B: Caird's _Comte_.]

"An atom with some certain properties
Known about, thought of as occasion needs."[C]

[Footnote C: _A Bean-Stripe_.]

In this general distrust of knowledge, however, there are, as might be
expected, many different degrees. Its origin in modern times was, no
doubt, the doctrine of Kant. "This divorce of thing and thought," says
Hegel, "is mainly the work of the critical philosophy and runs counter
to the conviction of all previous ages." And the completeness of the
divorce corresponds, with tolerable accuracy, to the degree in which the
critical philosophy has been understood; for Kant's writings, like those
of all great thinkers, are capable of many interpretations, varying in
depth with the intelligence of the interpreters.

The most common and general form of this view of the limitation of the
human intelligence is that which places the objects of religious faith
beyond the reach of human knowledge. We find traces of it in much of the
popular theology of our day. The great facts of religion are often
spoken of as lying in an extra-natural sphere, beyond experience, into
which men cannot ent