ised as follows:--

1. The conditions of human thought compel the recognition of an
unknowable reality of which all phenomena are the expression.

2. The function of religion, from the earliest time, has been the
assertion of the existence of an unknowable reality, and to keep alive a
consciousness of the insoluble mystery surrounding it.

3. The function of science is to deal with the known and the knowable,
with all that is presented in experience, with the world of phenomena
exclusively.

4. Religion having for its subject matter the unknown and unknowable,
while science has for its subject matter the known and the knowable,
religion and science are not antagonistic, but complementary. Conflicts
only arise when one trespasses on the other's department, and a
recognition of the true line of demarcation effectually reconciles these
hitherto hostile forces.

A very obvious criticism of number one is in affirming a consciousness
of an "Unknowable," its quality of unknowableness is annihilated.
Existence can only be predicated of that which affects consciousness in
some manner; and so far as I have the slightest apprehension or
consciousness of anything existing, to that extent it ceases to be the
unknowable. Our knowledge of it may be imperfect or altogether
erroneous; we may feel it impossible that we should ever rightly
understand it; but so far as we think about it we are bound to
assimilate it to the best of our knowledge, even though it be only under
the category of force. In brief, "unknowableness" is not a property or
quality by which a thing may be apprehended; it is a name for complete
mental vacuity. It does not refer to the thing itself, it refers only to
us. It is a pure negation which Spencer, by sheer verbal play converts
into a quasi-positive conception. A consciousness of things unknown can
never be more than a consciousness of ignorance. There is only one way
to prove the existence of an unknowable, and that is to know nothing
about it--not even to know that there is something about which we know
nothing.

But, says Spencer, "to say that we cannot know the absolute is, by
implication, to affirm that there is an absolute." Certainly, if we take
an infirmity of language to be the equivalent of a necessity of
existence, not otherwise. When I say that we cannot know a four-sided
triangle I do not affirm by implication that a four-sided triangle
exists. I am asserting that the phrase, a four-sided tria