What Can I Know?
An Inquiry Into Truth, Its Nature, the Means of Its Attainment, and Its Relations to the Practical Life (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from What Can I Know: An Inquiry Into Truth, Its Nature, the Means of Its Attainment, and Its Relations to the Practical Life<br><br>The asking of questions, and the conscious, persistent, and deliberate search for their answers, is characteristically human. Even in the quest for the gratification of his appetites, the intellect, volitions, and tastes of man are involved in a quite different way from that which is the case with any of the lower animals. Only man makes a problem demanding thought and exciting anxiety out of the questions: "What shall I eat" or, "What shall I drink" or, "What shall I put on" In answering these and all similar inquiries, he defers to customs that have established themselves, not merely in considerations of physical necessity, but also of propriety, aesthetieal gratification, find moral obligation. And these considerations are themselves the fruits of reflection, if not on the part of the individual, at least on the part of the clan, tribe, or race, to which the individual belongs.<br><br>But what is for our present purpose more important to notice, is this: It is characteristic of human reason to ask and pursue the answer of yet more abstract and deeply hidden questions.<br><br>About the Publisher<br><br>Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com<br><br>This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.