ign validity" and
"unrestricted claims to truth." If I speak of human knowledge I do not
do so as an affront to the dwellers in other worlds whom I have not
the honor to know, but only because animals have knowledge also, not
sovereign, however. The dog recognises a divinity in his master, who
may, however, be a great fool.

"Is human thought sovereign?" Before we can answer "yes" or "no" we
must first examine what human thought is. Is it the thought of an
individual man? No. It exists only as the individual thoughts of many
millions of men, past, present and to come. If I now say, having
comprehended the thought of all men in the future also under my
concept, that it is able to understand the entire universe, if man
only lasts long enough, and the organs of perception are unlimited,
and the objects to be comprehended have no limits upon their
comprehensibility, my statement is banal and barren. The most valuable
result of such a conclusion would be to cause in us a tremendous
distrust of present day knowledge. Because, to all appearance, we are
just standing at the threshold of human history and the generations
which will correct us will be much more numerous than those whose
knowledge--often with little enough regard,--we ourselves correct.
Herr Duehring himself explains the necessity of consciousness,
knowledge and perception only becoming apparent in a collection of
separate individuals. We can only apply the word sovereignty to the
thought of these individuals in so far as we do not know of any force
which can defeat thought. But we all know that there is no
significance to nor power of interpretation of the sovereign power of
the knowledge of the thought of each individual, and, according to our
experience, there is much more that requires improvement and
correction in it than not.

In other words, the sovereignty of thought is realised in a number of
highly unsovereign men capable of thinking, the knowledge which has
unlimited pretensions to truth is realised in a number of relative
blunders; neither the one nor the other can be fully realised except
through an endless eternity of human existence.

We have here again the same contradiction as above between the
necessary, as an absolute conceived characteristic of human thought,
and its reality in the very limited thinking single individual, a
contradiction which can only be solved in the endless progression of
the human race, that is endless as far as we are