(_b_) The same argument that proves God unknowable proves the universe unknowable also. Since every particle of matter in the universe attracts every other, no one particle can be exhaustively explained without taking account of all the rest. Thomas Carlyle: “It is a mathematical fact that the casting of this pebble from my hand alters the centre of gravity of the universe.” Tennyson, Higher Pantheism: “Flower in the crannied wall, I pluck you out of the crannies; Hold you here, root and all, in my hand, Little flower; but if I could understand What you are, root and all, and all in all, I should know what God and man is.” Schurman, Agnosticism, 119—“Partial as it is, this vision of the divine transfigures the life of man on earth.” Pfleiderer, Philos. Religion, 1:167—“A faint-hearted agnosticism is worse than the arrogant and titanic gnosticism against which it protests.” E. Because all predicates of God are negative, and therefore furnish no real knowledge. We answer: (_a_) Predicates derived from our consciousness, such as spirit, love, and holiness, are positive. (_b_) The terms “infinite” and “absolute,” moreover, express not merely a negative but a positive idea—the idea, in the former case, of the absence of all limit, the idea that the object thus described goes on and on forever; the idea, in the latter case, of entire self-sufficiency. Since predicates of God, therefore, are not merely negative, the argument mentioned above furnishes no valid reason why we may not know him. _Versus_ Sir William Hamilton, Metaphysics, 530—“The absolute and the infinite can each only be conceived as a negation of the thinkable; in other words, of the absolute and infinite we have no conception at all.” Hamilton here confounds the infinite, or the absence of _all_ limits, with the indefinite, or the absence of all _known_ limits. _Per contra_, see Calderwood, Moral Philosophy, 248, and Philosophy of the Infinite, 272—“Negation of one thing is possible only by affirmation of another.” Porter, Human Intellect, 652—“If the Sandwich Islanders, for lack of name, had called the ox a _not-hog_, the use of a negative appellation would not necessarily authorize the inference of a want of definite conceptions or positive knowledge.” So with the infinite or not-finite, the unconditioned or not-conditioned, the independent or not-dependent,—these names do not imply that we cannot conceive and know it as something positive. Spencer, First Principles, 92—“Our consciousness of the Absolute, indefinite though it is, is positive, and not negative.”