17. What I wished principally to impress upon you in my last lecture was, the distinction between relative truth and absolute truth. All truth is, in one sense, relative; that is to say, whatever we know or think of must be known or thought of in relation to ourselves. All that we know must be known in conformity with our capacities of knowledge, and cannot be known except under the conditions imposed by these capacities. But here is where the distinction lies: relative truth is truth which comes to us in virtue of our particular nature as human intelligences; absolute truth is truth which comes to us in virtue of our common nature, as intelligences simply, what is here looked to being merely the circumstance that we are intelligences at all, and not the circumstance that we are this or that particular kind or order of intelligence. Let us suppose a number of intelligences divided into different kinds, into various orders and degrees; you will observe that, by the ordinary logical doctrine, each of these kinds must embrace something peculiar to itself, and also something common to the whole number, however numerous the classes of intelligences may be. Now, what I want to impress upon you is this: that each of these kinds of intelligence will know and apprehend partly in conformity with the peculiar endowment of what I have spoken, and partly also in conformity with the common endowment of which I have spoken. And what it apprehends in conformity with its peculiar capacity is relative truth; what it
