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Mr. Darwin calls Spencer our "great philosopher." His is the speculating mind of the new school of science. This gives to his opinions special interest, although no one but himself is to be held responsible for his peculiar views, except so far as others see fit to avow them. Mr. Spencer postulates neither mind nor matter. He begins with Force. Force, however, is itself perfectly inscrutable. All we know about it is, that it is, that it is indestructible, and that it is persistent.

As to the origin of the universe, he says there are three possible suppositions: 1st. That it is self-existent. 2d. That it is self-created. 3d. That it is created by an external agency.[3] All these he examines and rejects. The first is equivalent to Atheism, by which Spencer understands the doctrine which makes Space, Matter, and Force eternal and the causes of all phenomena. This, he says, assumes the idea of self-existence, which is unthinkable. The second theory he makes equivalent to Pantheism. "The precipitation of vapor," he says, "into cloud, aids us in forming a symbolic conception of a self-evolved universe;" but, he adds, "really to conceive self-creation, is to conceive potential existence passing into actual existence by some inherent necessity, which we cannot do." (p. 32). The Theistic theory, he says, is equally untenable. "Whoever agrees that the atheistic hypothesis is untenable because it involves the impossible idea of self-existence, must perforce admit that the theistic hypothesis is untenable if it contains the same impossible idea." (p. 38). The origin of the universe is, therefore, a fact which cannot be explained. It must have had a cause; and all we know is that its cause is unknowable and inscrutable.

When we turn to nature the result is the same. Everything is inscrutable. All we know is that there are certain appearances, and that where there is appearance there must be something that appears. But what that something is, what is the noumenon which underlies the phenomenon, it is impossible for us to know. In nature we find two orders of phenomena, or appearances; the one objective or external, the other subjective in our consciousness. There are an Ego and a non-Ego, a subject and object. These are not identical. "It is," he says, "rigorously impossible to conceive that our knowledge is a knowledge of appearances only, without at the same time conceiving a reality of which they are appearances, for appearance without reality is unthinkable." (p. 88). So far we can go. There is a reality which is the cause of phenomena. Further than that, in that direction, our ignorance is profound. He proves that space cannot be an entity, an attribute, or a category of thought, or a nonentity. The same is true of time, of motion, of matter, of electricity, light, magnetism, etc., etc. They all resolve themselves into appearances produced by an unknown cause.

As the question, What is matter? is a crucial one, he dwells upon it in various parts of his writings. Newton's theory of ultimate atoms; Leibnitz's doctrine of monads; and the dynamic theory of Boscovich, which makes matter mere centres of force, are all dismissed as unthinkable. It is not very clear in what sense that word is to be taken. Sometimes it seems to mean, meaningless; at others, self-contradictory or absurd; at others, inconceivable, i.e. that of which no conception or mental image can be formed; at any rate, it implies what is unknowable and untenable. The result is, so far as matter is concerned, that we know nothing about it. "Our conception of matter," he says, "reduced to its simplest shape, is that of coexistent positions that offer resistance, as contrasted with our conception of space in which the coexistent positions offer no resistance." (p. 166). Resistance, however, is a form of force; and, therefore, on the following page, Spencer says, "that forces standing in certain correlations, form the whole contents of our idea of matter."

When we turn from the objective to the subjective, from the external to the inward world, the result is still the same. He agrees with Hume in saying that the contents of our consciousness is a series of impressions and ideas. He dissents, however, from that philosopher, in saying that that series is all we know. He admits that impressions necessarily imply that there is something that is impressed. He starts the question, What is it that thinks? and answers, We do not know. (p. 63). He admits that the reality of individual personal minds, the conviction of personal existence is universal, and perhaps indestructible. Nevertheless that conviction cannot justify itself at the bar of reason; nay, reason is found to reject it. (p. 65). Dean Mansel says, that consciousness gives us a knowledge of self as a substance and not merely of its varying states. This, however, he says, "is absolutely negatived by the laws of thought. The fundamental condition to all consciousness, emphatically insisted upon by Mr. Mansel in common with Sir William Hamilton and others, is the antithesis of subject and object. … What is the corollary from this doctrine, as bearing on the consciousness of self? The mental act in which self is known implies, like every other mental act, a perceiving subject and a perceived object. If, then, the object perceived is self, what is the subject that perceives? Or if it is the true self which thinks, what other self can it be that is thought of? Clearly, a true cognition of self implies a state in which the knowing and the known are one—in which subject and object are identified; and this Mr. Mansel rightly holds to be the annihilation of both. So that the personality of which each is conscious, and of which the existence is to each a fact beyond all others the most certain, is yet a thing which cannot be known at all; knowledge of it is forbidden by the very nature of human thought." (pp. 65, 66).

Mr. Spencer does not seem to expect that any man will be shaken in his conviction by any such argument as that. When a man is conscious of pain, he is not to be puzzled by telling him that the pain is one thing (the object perceived) and the self another thing (the perceiving subject). He knows that the pain is a state of the self of which he is conscious. Consciousness is a form of knowledge; but knowledge of necessity supposes an intelligent reality which knows. A philosophy which cannot be received until men cease to believe in their own existence, must be in extremis.

Mr. Spencer's conclusion is, that the universe—nature, or the external world with all its marvels and perpetual changes—the world of consciousness with its ever varying states, are impressions or phenomena, due to an inscrutable, persistent force.

As to the nature of this primal force or power, he quotes abundantly and approvingly from Sir William Hamilton and Mr. Mansel, to prove that it is unknowable, inconceivable, unthinkable. He, however, differs from those distinguished writers in two points. While admitting that we know no more of the first cause than we do of a geometrical figure which is at once a circle and a square, yet we do know that it is actual. For this conviction we are not dependent on faith. In the second place, Hamilton and Mansel taught that we know that the Infinite cannot be a person, self-conscious, intelligent, and voluntary; yet we are forced by our moral constitution to believe it to be an intelligent person. This Mr. Spencer denies. "Let those," he says, "who can, believe that there is eternal war between our intellectual faculties and our moral obligations. I, for one, admit of no such radical vice in the constitution of things." (p. 108). Religion has always erred, he asserts, in that while it teaches that the Infinite Being cannot be known, it insists on ascribing to it such and such attributes, which of course assumes that so far forth it is known. We have no right, he contends, to ascribe personality to the "Unknown Reality," or anything else, except that it is the cause of all that we perceive or experience. There may be a mode of being, as much transcending intelligence and will, as these transcend mechanical motion. To show the folly of referring to the Unknown the attributes of our own spirits, he makes "the grotesque supposition that the tickings and other movements of a watch constituted a kind of consciousness; and that a watch possessed of such a consciousness, insisted on regarding the watchmaker's actions as determined like its own by springs and escapements." (p. 111). The vast majority of men, instead of agreeing with Mr. Spencer in this matter, will doubtless heartily, each for himself, join the German philosopher Jacobi, in saying, "I confess to Anthropomorphism inseparable from the conviction that man bears the image of God; and maintain that besides this Anthropomorphism, which has always been called Theism, is nothing but Atheism or Fetichism."[4]

Mr. Spencer, therefore, in accounting for the origin of the universe and all its phenomena, physical, vital, and mental, rejects Theism, or the doctrine of a personal God, who is extramundane as well as antemundane, the creator and governor of all things; he rejects Pantheism, which makes the finite the existence-form of the Infinite; he rejects Atheism, which he understands to be the doctrine of the eternity and self-existence of matter and force. He contents himself with saying we must acknowledge the reality of an unknown something which is the cause of all things—the noumenon of all phenomena. "If science and religion are to be reconciled, the basis of the reconciliation must be this deepest, widest, and most certain of all facts—that the Power which the universe manifests is utterly inscrutable." (p. 46). "The ultimate of ultimates is Force." "Matter and motion, as we know them, are differently conditioned manifestations of force." "If, to use an algebraic illustration, we represent Matter, Motion, and Force, by the symbols x, y, z; then we may ascertain the values of x and y in terms of z, but the value of z can never be found; z is the unknown quantity, which must forever remain unknown, for the obvious reason that there is nothing in which its value can be expressed." (pp. 169, 170).

We have, then, no God but Force. Atheist is everywhere regarded as a term of reproach. Every man instinctively recoils from it. Even the philosophers of the time of the French Revolution repudiated the charge of atheism, because they believed in motion; and motion being inscrutable, they believed in an inscrutable something, i.e. in Force. We doubt not Mr. Spencer would indignantly reject the imputation of atheism; nevertheless, in the judgment of most men, the difference between Antitheist and Atheist is a mere matter of orthography.