But have not even the most sober-minded of the Partial Mystics greatly exceeded the limits of human knowledge, more or less continuously, throughout their conclusions? Is Kant completely in the wrong? And are not the Positivists right in restricting all certain cognition to the experiences of the senses and to the Mathematico-Physical Sciences built upon those experiences? And, again, is there such a thing at all as specifically Mystical Experience or Knowledge? And, if so, what is its worth?--I must keep the elaboration of the (ultimately connected) question, as to the nature of the realities experienced or known--as to the human spirit and the Divine Spirit, and their inter-relations, hence as to Pantheism and Personality--for the next chapter, and can here but prepare the ground for it, by the elucidation of certain important points in general Epistemology, and of the more obvious characteristics of Mystical apprehension. 1. _Positivist Epistemology an error._ As regards general Epistemology, we may well take up the following positions. (1) We cannot but reject, with Prof. Volkelt, as a mere vulgar error, the Positivist limitation of trans-subjectively valid knowledge to direct sense-perception and to the laws of the so-called Empirical Sciences. For, as he shows conclusively, the only fact which is absolutely indubitable, is that of the bare occurrence of our (possibly utterly misleading) sensations and impressions. Some of these are, it is true, accompanied by a certain pressure upon our minds to credit them with trans-subjective validity; and the fact of this (possibly quite misleading) pressure is itself part of our undeniable experience. Yet we can, if we will, treat this pressure also as no more than a meaningless occurrence, and not as evidencing the trans-subjective reality which it seems to indicate. No man, it is true, has ever succeeded in consistently carrying out such a refusal of assent,--since no scepticism is so thorough but that it derives its very power, against the trans-subjective validity of some of the impressions furnished with trans-subjective pressure, from an utterly inconsistent acceptance, as trans-subjectively valid, of other impressions furnished with a precisely similar trans-subjective intimation. Yet the fact remains that, in all such cases of trans-subjective pressure, the mind has “an immediate experience of which the content is precisely this, that we are justified in proceeding with these concepts into what is absolutely beyond the possibility of being experienced by us.” “Positivistic Cognition,” to which no man, Positivist included, can systematically restrict himself, “abides absolutely within the immediately experienced. Logical Cognition,” which every man practises surreptitiously if not avowedly, “exceeds experience at every step, and conceptually determines what is absolutely incapable of being experienced, yet the justification for this kind of cognition is, here