en are apt to take cunning
phrases for answers; and that the limitation of our faculties, in a
great number of cases, renders real answers to such questions, not
merely actually impossible, but theoretically inconceivable.

Philosophy and history having laid hold of me in this eccentric fashion,
have never loosened their grip. I have no pretension to be an expert in
either subject; but the turn for philosophical and historical reading,
which rendered Hamilton and Guizot attractive to me, has not only filled
many lawful leisure hours, and still more sleepless ones, with the
repose of changed mental occupation, but has not unfrequently disputed
my proper work-time with my liege lady, Natural Science. In this way I
have found it possible to cover a good deal of ground in the territory
of philosophy; and all the more easily that I have never cared much
about A's or B's opinions, but have rather sought to know what answer he
had to give to the questions I had to put to him--that of the limitation
of possible knowledge the chief. The ordinary examiner, his "State the
views of So-and-so," would have floored me at any time. If he had said
what do _you_ think about any given problem, I might have got on fairly
well.

The reader who has had the patience to follow the enforced, but
unwilling, egotism of this veritable history (especially if his studies
have led him in the same direction), will now see why my mind steadily
gravitated towards the conclusions of Hume and Kant, so well stated by
the latter in a sentence, which I have quoted elsewhere.

"The greatest and perhaps the sole use of all philosophy of pure reason
is, after all, merely negative, since it serves not as an organon for
the enlargement [of knowledge], but as a discipline for its
delimitation; and, instead of discovering truth, has only the modest
merit of preventing error." [38]

When I reached intellectual maturity and began to ask myself whether I
was an atheist, a theist, or a pantheist; a materialist or an idealist;
a Christian or a freethinker; I found that the more I learned and
reflected, the less ready was the answer; until, at last, I came to the
conclusion that I had neither art nor part with any of these
denominations, except the last. The one thing in which most of these
good people were agreed was the one thing in which I differed from them.
They were quite sure they had attained a certain "gnosis,"--had, more or
less successfully, solved the pro