objective evidence, and I do. Of some things we feel that we
are certain: we know, and we know that we do know. There is
something that gives a click inside of us, a bell that
strikes twelve, when the hands of our mental clock have
swept the dial and meet over the meridian hour. The greatest
empiricists among us are only empiricists on reflection:
when left to their instincts, they dogmatize like infallible
popes. When the Cliffords tell us how sinful it is to be
Christians on such 'insufficient evidence,' insufficiency is
really the last thing they have in mind. For them the
evidence is absolutely sufficient, only it makes the other
way. They believe so completely in an anti-Christian order
of the universe that there is no living option: Christianity
is a dead hypothesis from the start.

     6. Objective Certitude and its Unattainability. But
now, since we are all such absolutists by instinct, what in
our quality of students of philosophy ought we to do about
the fact? Shall we espouse and endorse it? Or shall we treat
it as a weakness of our nature from which we must free
ourselves, if we can?

     I sincerely believe that the latter course is the only
one we can follow as reflective men. Objective evidence and
certitude are doubtless very fine ideals to play with, but
where on this moonlit and dream-visited planet are they
found? I am, therefore, myself a complete empiricist so far
as my theory of human knowledge goes. I live, to be sure, by
the practical faith that we must go on experiencing and
thinking over our experience, for only thus can our opinions
grow more true; but to hold any one of them -- I absolutely
do not care which -- as if it never could be reinterpretable
or corrigible, I believe to be a tremendously mistaken
attitude, and I think that the whole history of philosophy
will bear me out. There is but one indefectibly certain
truth, and that is the truth that pyrrhonistic skepticism
itself leaves standing, -- the truth that the present
phenomenon of consciousness exists. That, however, is the
bare starting-point of knowledge, the mere admission of a
stuff to be philosophized about. The various philosophies
are but so many attempts at expressing what this stuff
really is. And if we repair to our libraries what
disagreement do we discover! Where is a certainly true
answer found? Apart from abstract propositions of comparison
(such as two and two are the same as four), propositions
which tell us nothing by themselves about concrete reality,
we find no proposition ever regarded by any one as evidently
certain that has not either been called a falsehood, or at
least had its truth sincerely questioned by some one else.
The transcending of the axioms of geometry, not in play but
in earnest, by certain of our contemporaries (as Zollner and
Charles H. Hinton), and the rejection of the whole
Aristotelian logic by the Hegelians, are striking instances
in point.

     No concrete test of what is really true has ever been
agreed upon. Some make the criterion external to the moment
of perception, putting it either in revelation, the
<consensus gentium>, the instincts of the heart, or the
systematized experience of the race. Others make the
perceptive moment its own test, Descartes, for instance,
with his clear and distinct ideas guaranteed by the veracity
of God; Reid with his 'common-sense;' and Kant with his
forms of synthetic judgment . The inconceivability
of the opposite; the capacity to be verified by sense; the
possession of complete organic unity or self-relation,
realized when a thing is its own other, -- are standards
which, in turn, have been used, The much lauded objective
evidence is never triumphantly there; it is a mere
aspiration or <Grenzbegriff>, marking the infinitely remote
ideal of our thinking life. To claim that certain truths now
possess it, is simply to say that when you think them true
and they  true, then their evidence is objective,
otherwise it is not. But practically one's conviction that
the evidence one goes by is of the real objective brand, is
only one more subjective opinion added to the lot. For what
a contradictory array of opinions have objective evidence
and absolute certitude been claimed! The world is rational
through and through, -- its existence is an ultimate brute
fact; there is a personal God, -- a personal God is
inconceivable; there is an extra-mental physical world
immediately known, -- the mind can only know its own ideas;
a moral imperative exists, -- obligation is only the
resultant of desires; a permanent spiritual principle is in
every one, -- there are only shifting states of mind; there
is an endless chain of causes, -- there is an absolute first
cause; an eternal necessity, -- a freedom; a purpose, -- no
purpose; a primal One, -- a primal Many; a universal
continuity, -- an essential discontinuity in things; an
infinity, -- no infinity. There is this, -- there is that;
there is indeed nothing which some one has not thought
absolutely true, while his neighbor deemed it absolutely
false; and not an absolutist among them seems ever to have
considered that the trouble may all the time be essential,
and that the intellect, even with truth directly in its
grasp, may have no infallible signal for knowing whether it
be truth or no. When, indeed, one remembers that the most
striking practical application to life of the doctrine of
objective certitude has been the conscientious labors of the
Holy Office of the Inquisition, one feels less tempted than