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be an event or existence which knowledge would have to approach and lay siege to somehow from the outside, so that for knowledge (the only reality on this system) they would always remain phantoms, creatures of a superstitious instinct, terms for ever posited but never possessed, and therefore perpetually unreal. If fact or truth had any separate being it could not be an integral part of knowledge; what modicum of reality facts or truths can possess they must borrow from knowledge, in which they perforce remain ideals only; so that it is only as unreal that they are real at all. Transcendentalists are sure that knowledge is everything, not because they presume that everything is known, but precisely because they see that there is nothing to know. If anything existed actually, or if there was any independent truth, it would be unknowable, as these voracious thinkers conceive knowledge. The glorious thing about knowledge, in their eyes, is that, as there is nothing to know, knowledge is a free and a sure creation, new and self-grounded for ever.

Transcendentalism, when it is thorough, accordingly agrees with the Indian systems in maintaining that the illusion that given objects exist has itself no existence. Any actual sensation, any instance of thinking, would be a self-existing fact; but facts are only concepts, that is, inert terms in absolute thought: if illusions occurred actually, they would not be concepts but events, and though their visionary objects might be non-existent, the vision of them would exist; and they would be the sort of independent facts which transcendental logic excludes as impossible. Acts of judging or positing or imagining cannot be admitted on this system until they in their turn have been posited in another judgement; that is, until the cease to hide their heads in the obscurity of self-existence, and become purely ideal themes of actual