This is in fact—
'Well didst thou say, Athena's noblest son,
The most we know is nothing can be known.'
The next is—
'Essence and substance, sequence, cause, beginning, ending, space and time,
These be the toys of manhood's mind, at once ridiculous and sublime.'
"He is not the only one who so regards 'bothering Time and Space.' A late definition of the 'infinitely great,' viz. that the idea arises from denying form to any figure; of the 'infinitely small,' from refusing magnitude to any figure, is a fair specimen of the 'dismal science'—metaphysics.
"Another omitted stanza reads—
'How canst thou, Phenomen! pretend the Noumenon to mete and span?
Say which were easier probed and proved, Absolute Being or mortal man?'
"One would think that he had read Kant on the 'Knowable and the Unknowable,' or had heard of the Yankee lady, who could 'differentiate between the Finite and the Infinite.' It is a commonplace of the age, in the West as well as the East, that Science is confined to phenomena, and cannot reach the Noumena, the things themselves. This is the scholastic realism, the 'residuum of a bad metaphysic,' which deforms the system of Comte. With all its pretensions, it simply means that there are, or can be conceived, things in themselves (i.e. unrelated to thought); that we know them to exist; and, at the same time, that we cannot know what they are. But who dares say 'cannot'? Who can measure man's work when he shall be as superior to our present selves as we are to the Caveman of part time?
"The 'Chain of Universe' alludes to the Jain idea that the whole, consisting of intellectual as well as of natural principles, existed from all eternity; and that it has been subject to endless revolutions, whose causes are the inherent powers of nature, intellectual as well as physical, without the intervention of a deity. But the Poet ridicules the 'non-human,' i.e. the not-ourselves, the negation of ourselves and consequently a non-existence. Most Easterns confuse the contradictories, in which one term stands for something, and the other for nothing (e.g. ourselves and not-ourselves), with the contraries (e.g. rich and not-rich = poor), in which both terms express a something. So the positive-negative 'infinite' is not the complement of 'finite,' but its negation. The Western man derides the process by making 'not-horse' the complementary entity of 'horse.' The Pilgrim ends with the favourite Soofi tenet that the five (six?) senses are the doors of all human knowledge, and that no form of man, incarnation of the deity, prophet, apostle or sage, has ever produced an idea not conceived within his brain by the sole operation of these vulgar material agents. Evidently he is neither spiritualist nor idealist.