Human Knowledge

John Dalton

Human knowledge is invariably limited and partial. There is only so much any one person, however intelligent and well informed, can reasonably claim to know with certainty. Whatever he knows is necessarily mediated through his instruments, his senses, his reason, his brain. It is impossible for him to have access to an unmediated vantage point independent of his instruments and apart from his organism whence he could check to see whether his mediated knowledge corresponds to reality as such. No matter how well it can be explained, reality remains essentially mysterious. And on the great questions of what it means to be born and die, do good and evil, the natural sciences are silent.

---Living With the Devil, by Stephen Batchelor---