_Reader._ Be modest, doctor; for you know of how many blunders you stand already convicted. Absolute being is not necessarily “that which transcends the surrounding sensual world.” The sun, the moon, the planets have their absolute being, and yet do not transcend matter. Now, can we not form a notion of the absolute being of these bodies? You say that “all our knowledge is relative, and results from the comparison of surrounding sensible objects”; but you should reflect that all relative knowledge implies the knowledge of the absolute terms from the comparison of which the relation is to be detected. Hence you cannot admit the knowledge of the relative without assuming the knowledge of the absolute. Accordingly, it is false that “all our knowledge is relative,” at least in the sense of your argumentation. Nor is it true that all our knowledge “results from the comparison of surrounding sensible objects.” There is a kind of knowledge which results from the comparison of intellectual principles, as the knowledge of the logical rules; and there is also a knowledge which results, not from the comparison, but from the intellectual analysis, of things, as the knowledge of the constituent principles of being. If I ask you what is _distance_, you will soon point out any two sensible objects, by the comparison of which distance may become known; but if I ask you what is _syllogism_, or what is _judgment_, or what is _philosophy_, I defy you to point out any “surrounding sensible objects,” by the comparison of which such notions may be understood. I need not discuss your assertion that “we could have no notion of darkness without light, no conception of high without low, of heat without coldness, etc.” I may concede the assertion as irrelevant for, whenever we designate things by relative terms, it is clear that each relative carries within itself the connotation of its correlative. But it does not follow that all our knowledge is relative. How can we know, for instance, the relation of brotherhood intervening between James and John, if we know neither the one nor the other? Can we conceive the _brother_ without the _man_? Or is it necessary, when we know the man, that in such a man we should see his peculiar relation to another man?