hes special to each, there emerges the need
for the Last and Unconditional Reason. And the actual situation is not
that this Reason appears only on the horizon of our finite knowledge,'
as Kant would have it. 'Not in thus merely extending our knowledge lies
the significance of the situation, but in the fact that this
Unconditional Reason constitutes the presupposition without which no
desire for Knowledge (in the proper and strict sense of the word) is
truly thinkable.'[39]

And lastly, all this and more points to philosophical Agnosticism as an
artificial system, and one hopelessly inadequate to the depths of human
experience. Assuredly Bossuet is right: 'man knows not the whole of
anything'; and mystery, in this sense, is also of the essence of all
higher religion. But what man knows of anything is that thing
manifested, not essentially travestied, in that same thing's
appearances. We men are most assuredly realities forming part of a real
world-whole of various realities; those other realities continuously
affect our own reality; we cannot help thinking certain things about
these other realities; and these things, when accepted and pressed home
by us in action or in science, turn out, by our success in this their
utilization, to be rightly apprehended by us, as parts of
interconnected, objective Nature. Thus our knowledge of Reality is real
as far as it goes, and philosophical Agnosticism is a _doctrinaire_
position. We can say with Herbert Spencer, in spite of his predominant
Agnosticism, that 'the error' committed by philosophers intent upon
demonstrating the limits and conditions of consciousness 'consists in
assuming that consciousness contains _nothing but_ limits and
conditions, to the entire neglect of that which is limited and
conditioned'. In reality 'there is some thing which alike forms the raw
material of definite thought and remains after the definiteness, which
thinking gave to it, has been destroyed'.[40]

II

Let us next consider five of the most ancient and extensively developed
amongst the still living Religions: the Israelitish-Jewish and the
Christian religions shall, as by far the best known to us and as the
most fully articulated, form the great bulk of this short account; the
Confucian, Buddhist, and Mohammedan religions will be taken quite
briefly, only as contrasts to, or elucidations of, the characteristics
found in the Jewish and Christian faiths. All this in view of the
question conc