LEWES — Notes

Paye 9. § 9 (end) Answer. All facts, whether of a material nature or of a spiritual, contain in themselves, of necessity, their own interpretation, physical and material facts by a physical and material method, spiritual facts by a spiritual method. A phainoumenon externally objective has a natural interpretation, as being apart of what we call «nature»; a phainoumenon internally objective, «subjective» as Lewes calls it, has a rational interpretation. Only by reducing, and in so far as we reduce phainoumena of mind to phainoumena of brain, are all things brought under the dominion of empirical verification.

Our methods of considering a thing are two: by examining the thing in itself, and attempting to extract therefrom (...) of it, and by examining it in relation to other things. But there is one more consideration to be made.

Science, by its misunderstanding of the nature of the infinite has been led into the idea that the knowledge of the unknown is from the known, that the unknown, as Lewes asserts (1‑9, § 10), is but a generalisation of the known, a prolongation of it (thereof). This method fails to perceive that the known is parted from the unknown by the enormous gulf of relative and of absolute, that the only way to attain to some conception (not knowledge) of the unknown is by consideration of the unknown in the known — from the unknown in the known to the unknown in itself. No one has ever held that man has a transcendant knowledge of the absolute.