First Principles
by Herbert Spencer
1862

Part I



The Unknowable




Chapter 1




Religion and Science




§1. We too often forget that not only is there "a soul of goodness
in things evil," but very generally also, a soul of truth in things
erroneous. While many admit the abstract probability that a falsity has usually
a nucleus of verity, few bear this abstract probability in mind, when passing
judgment on the options of others. A belief that is proved to be grossly
at variance with fact, is cast aside with indignation or contempt; and in
the heat of antagonism scarcely any one inquires what there was in this belief
which commended it to men's minds. Yet there must have been something. And
there is reason to suspect that this something was its correspondence with
certain of their experiences: an extremely limited or vague correspondence
perhaps, but still, a correspondence. Even the absurdest report may in nearly
every instance be traced to an actual occurrence; and had there been no such
actual occurrence, this preposterous misrepresentation of it would never
have existed. Though the distorted or magnified image transmitted to us through
the refracting medium of rumour, is utterly unlike the reality; yet in the
absence of the reality there would have been no distorted or magnified image.
And thus it is with human beliefs in general. Entirely wrong as they may
appear, the implication is that they originally contained, and perhaps still
contain, some small amount of truth.




Definite views on this matter would be very useful to us. It is important
that we should form something like a general theory of current options, so
that we may neither over-estimate nor under-estimate their worth. Arriving
at correct judgments on disputed questions, much depends on the mental attitude
preserved while listening to, or taking part in, the controversies; and for
the preservation of a right attitude, it is needful that we should learn
how true, and yet how untrue, are average human beliefs. On the one hand,
we must keep free from that bias in favour of received ideas which expresses
itself in such dogmas as "What every one says must be true," or
"The voice of the people is the voice of God." On the other hand,
the fact disclosed by a survey of the past that majorities have usually been
wrong, must not blind us to the complementary fact that majorities have usually
not been entirely wrong. And the avoidance of these extremes being a pre-requisite
to catholic thinking, we shall do well to provide ourselves with a safeguard
against them, by making a valuation of opinions in the abstract. To this
end we must contemplate the kind of relation that ordinarily subsists between
opinions and facts. Let us do so with one of those beliefs which under various
forms has prevailed among all nations in all times.




§2. Early traditions represent rulers as gods or demigods. By their
subjects, primitive kings were regarded as superhuman in origin and superhuman
in power. They possessed divine titles, received obeisances like those made
before the altars of deities, and were in some cases actually worshipped.
Of course along with the implied beliefs there existed a belief in the unlimited
power of the ruler over his subjects, extending even to the taking of their
lives at will; as until recently in Fiji, where a victim stood unbound to
be killed at the word of his chief himself declaring, "whatever the
king says must be done."




In other times and among other races, we find these beliefs a little modified.
The monarch, instead of being thought god or demigod, is conceived to be
a man having divine authority, with perhaps more or less of divine nature.
He retains, however, titles expressing his heavenly descent or relationships,
and is still saluted in forms and words as humble as those addressed to the
Deity. While in some places the lives and properties of his people, if not
so completely at his mercy, are still in theory supposed to be his.




Later in the progress of civilization, as during the middle ages in Europe,
the current opinions respecting the relationship of rulers and ruled are
further changed. For the theory of divine origin there is substituted that
of divine right. No longer god or demigod, or even god-descended, the king
is now regarded simply as God's vicegerent. The obeisances made to him are
not so extreme in their humility; and his sacred titles lose much of their
meaning. Moreover his authority ceases to be unlimited. Subjects deny his
right to dispose at will of their lives and properties, and yield allegiance
only in the shape of obedience to his commands.




With advancing political option has come still greater restriction of
monarchical power. Belief in the supernatural character of the ruler, long
ago repudiated by ourselves for example, has left behind it nothing more
than the popular tendency to ascribe unusual goodness, wisdom, and beauty
to the monarch. Loyalty, which originally meant implicit submission to the
king's will, now means a merely nominal profession of subordination, and
the fulfilment of certain forms of respect. By deposing some and putting
others in their places, we have not only denied the divine rights of certain
men to rule, but we have denied that they have any rights beyond those originating
in the assent of the nation. Though our forms of speech and our State-documents
still assert the subjection of the citizens to the ruler, our actual beliefs
and our daily proceedings implicitly assert the contrary. We have entirely
divested the monarch of legislative power, and should immediately rebel against
his or her dictation even in matters of small concern.




Nor has the rejection of primitive political beliefs resulted only in
transferring the power of a autocrat to a representative body. The views
held respecting governments in general, of whatever form, are now widely
different from those once held. Whether popular or despotic, governments
in ancient times were supposed to have unlimited authority over their subjects.
Individuals existed for the benefit of the State; not the State for the benefit
of individuals. In our days, however, not only has the national will been
in many cases substituted for the will of the king, but the exercise of this
national will has been restricted. In England, for instance, though there
has been established no definite doctrine respecting the bounds to governmental
action, yet, in practice, sundry bounds to it are tacitly recognized by all.
There is no organic law declaring that a legislature may not freely dispose
of citizens' lives, as kings did of old, but were it possible for our legislature
to attempt such a thing, its own destruction would be the consequence, rather
than the destruction of citizens. How fully we have established the personal
liberties of the subject against the invasions of State-power, would be quickly
shown were it proposed by Act of Parliament to take possession of the nation,
or of any class, and turn its services to public ends, as the services of
the people were turned by Egyptian kings. Not only in our day have the claims
of the citizen to life, liberty, and property been thus made good against
the State, but sundry minor claims likewise. Ages ago laws regulating dress
and mode of living fell into disuse, and any attempt to revive them would
prove that such matters now lie beyond the sphere of legal control. For some
centuries we asserted in practice, and have now established in theory, the
right of every man to choose his own religious beliefs, instead of receiving
State-authorized beliefs. Within the last few generations complete liberty
of speech has been gained, in spite of all legislative attempts to suppress
or limit it. And still more recently we have obtained under a few exceptional
restrictions, freedom to trade with whomsoever we please. Thus our political
beliefs are widely different from ancient ones, not only as to the proper
depositary of power to be exercised over a nation, but also as to the extent
of that power.




Nor even here has the change ended. Besides the average opinions just
described as current among ourselves, there exists a less widely-diffused
opinion going still further in the same direction. There are to be found
men who contend that the sphere of government should be narrowed even more
than it is in England. They hold that the freedom of the individual, limited
only by the like freedom of other individuals, is sacred. They assert that
the sole function of the State is the protection of persons against one another,
and against a foreign foe; and they believe that the ultimate political condition
must be one in which personal freedom is the greatest possible and governmental
power the least possible.




Thus in different times and places we find, conceding the origin, authority,
and functions of government, a great variety of opinions. What now must be
said about the truth or falsity of these opinions? Must we say that some
one is wholly right and all the rest wholly wrong; or must we say that each
of them contains truth more or less disguised by errors? The latter alternative
is the one which analysis will force upon us. Every one of these doctrines
has for its vital element the recognition of an unquestionable fact. Directly
or by implication, each insists on a certain subordination of individual
actions to social dictates. There are differences respecting the power to
which this subordination is due; there are differences respecting the motive
for this subordination; there are differences respecting its extent; but
that there must be some subordination all are agreed. The most submissive
and the most recalcitrant alike hold that there are limits which individual
actions may not transgress -- limits which the one regards as originating
in a ruler's will, and which the other regards as deducible from the equal
claims of fellow-citizens.




It may doubtless be said that we here reach a very unimportant conclusion.
The question, however, is not the value or novelty of the particular truth
in this case arrived at. My aim has been to exhibit the more general truth,
that between the most diverse beliefs there is usually something in common,
-- something taken for granted in each; and that this something, if not to
be set down as an unquestionable verity, may yet be considered to have the
highest degree of probability. A postulate which, like the one above instanced,
is not consciously asserted but unconsciously involved, and which is unconsciously
involved not by one man or body of men, but by numerous bodies of men who
diverge in countless ways and degrees in the rest of their beliefs, has a
warrant far transcending any that can be usually shown.




Do we not thus arrive at a generalization which may habitually guide us
when seeking for the soul of truth in things erroneous? While the foregoing
illustration brings home the fact that in opinions seeming to be absolutely
wrong something right is yet to be found, it also indicates a way of finding
the something right. This way is to compare all opinions of the same genus;
to set aside as more or less discrediting one another those special and concrete
elements in which such opinions disagree; to observe what remains after these
have been eliminated; and to find for the remaining constituent that expression
which holds true throughout its various disguises.




§3. A consistent adoption of the method indicated will greatly aid
us in dealing with chronic antagonisms of belief. By applying it not only
to ideas with which we are unconcerned, but also to our own ideas and those
of our opponents, we shall be enabled to form more correct judgments. We
shall be led to suspect that our convictions are not wholly right, and that
the adverse convictions are not wholly wrong. On the one hand, we shall not,
in common with the great mass of the unthinking, let our creed be determined
by the mere accident of birth in a particular age on a particular part of
the Earth's surface, while, on the other hand, we shall be saved from that
error of entire and contemptuous negation, fallen into by most who take up
an attitude of independent criticism.




Of all antagonisms of belief the oldest, the widest, the most profound,
and the most important, is that between Religion and Science. It commenced
when recognition of the commonest uniformities in surrounding things, set
a limit to all-pervading superstitions. It shows itself everywhere throughout
the domain of human knowledge; affecting men's interpretations alike of the
simplest mechanical accidents and the most complex events in the histories
of nations. It has its roots deep down in the diverse habits of thought of
different orders of minds. And the conflicting conceptions of Nature and
Life which these diverse habits of thought severally generate, influence
for good or ill the tone of feeling and the daily conduct.




A battle of opinion like this which has been carried on for ages under
the banners of Religion and Science, has generated an animosity fatal to
a just estimate of either party by the other. Happily the times display an
increasing catholicity of feeling, which we shall do well to carry as far
as our natures permit. In proportion as we love truth more and victory less,
we shall become anxious to know what it is which leads our opponents to think
as they do. We shall begin to suspect that the pertinacity of belief exhibited
by them must result from a perception of something we have not perceived.
And we shall aim to supplement the portion of truth we have found with the
portion found by them. Making a rational estimate of human authority, we
shall avoid alike the extremes of undue submission and undue rebellion --
shall not regard some men's judgments as wholly good and others as wholly
bad; but shall, contrariwise, lean to the more defensible position that none
are completely right and none are completely wrong. Preserving, as far as
may be, this impartial attitude, let us then contemplate the two sides of
this great controversy. Keeping guard against the bias of education and shutting
out the whisperings of sectarian feeling, let us consider what are the a
priori probabilities in favour of each party.




§4. The general principle above illustrated must lead us to anticipate
that the diverse forms of religious belief which have existed and which still
exist, have all a basis in some ultimate fact. Judging by analogy the implication
is, not that any one of them is altogether right, but that in each there
is something right more or less disguised by other things wrong. It may be
that the soul of truth contained in erroneous creeds is extremely unlike
most, if not all, of its several embodiments; and indeed if, as we have good
reason to assume, it is much more abstract than any of them, its unlikeness
necessarily follows. But some essential verity must be looked for. To suppose
that these multiform conceptions should be one and all absolutely groundless,
discredits too profoundly that average human intelligence from which all
our individual intelligences are inherited.




To the presumption that a number of diverse beliefs of the same class
have some common foundation in fact, must in this case be added a further
presumption derived from the omnipresence of the beliefs. Religious ideas
of one kind or other are almost universal. Grant that among all men who have
passed a certain stage of intellectual development there are found vague
notions concerning the origin and hidden nature of surrounding things, and
there arises the inference that such notions are necessarily products of
progressing intelligence. Their endless variety serves but to strengthen
this conclusion: showing as it does a more or less independent genesis --
showing how, in different places and times like conditions have led to similar
trains of thought, ending in analogous results. A candid examination of the
evidence quite negatives the supposition that creeds are priestly inventions.
Even as a mere question of probabilities it cannot rationally be concluded
that in every society, savage and civilized, certain men have combined to
delude the rest in ways so analogous. Moreover, the hypothesis of artificial
origin fails to account for the facts. It does not explain why under all
changes of form, certain elements of religious belief remain constant. It
does not show how it happens that while adverse criticism has from age to
age gone on destroying particular theological dogmas, it has not destroyed
the fundamental conception underlying those dogmas. Thus the universality
of religious ideas, their independent evolution among different primitive
races, and their great vitality unite in showing that their source must be
deep-seated. In other words, we are obliged to admit that if not supernaturally
derived as the majority contend, they must be derived out of human experiences,
slowly accumulated and organized.




Should it be asserted that religious ideas are products of the religious
sentiment which, to satisfy itself, prompts imaginations that it afterwards
projects into the external world, and by-and-by mistakes for realities, the
problem is not solved, but only removed farther back. Whence comes the sentiment?
That it is a constituent in man's nature is implied by the hypothesis, and
cannot indeed be denied by those who prefer other hypotheses. And if the
religious sentiment, displayed constantly by the majority of mankind, and
occasionally aroused even in those seemingly devoid of it, must be classed
among human emotions, we cannot rationally ignore it. Here is an attribute
which has played a conspicuous part throughout the entire past as far back
as history records, and is at present the life of numerous institutions,
the stimulus to perpetual controversies, and the prompter of countless daily
actions. Evidently as a question in philosophy we are called on to say what
this attribute means; and we cannot decline the task without confessing our
philosophy to be incompetent.




Two suppositions only are open to us; the one that the feeling which responds
to religious ideas resulted, along with all other human faculties, from an
act of special creation; the other that it, in common with the rest, arose
by a process of evolution. If we adopt the first of these alternatives, universally
accepted by our ancestors and by the immense majority of our contemporaries,
the matter is at once settled: man is directly endowed with the religious
feeling by a creator; and to that creator it designedly responds. If we adopt
the second alternative, then we are met by the questions -- What are the
circumstances to which the genesis of the religious feeling is due? and --
What is its office? Considering, as we must on this supposition, all faculties
to be results of accumulated modifications caused by the intercourse of the
organism with its environment, we are obliged to admit that there exist in
the environment certain phenomena or conditions which have determined the
growth of the religious feeling, and so are obliged to admit that it is as
normal as any other faculty. Add to which that as, on the hypothesis of a
development of lower forms into higher the end towards which the progressive
changes tend, must be adaptation to the requirements of life, we are also
forced to infer that this feeling is in some way conducive to human welfare.
Thus both alternatives contain the same ultimate implication. We must conclude
that the religious sentiment is either directly created or is developed by
the slow action of natural causes, and whichever conclusion we adopt requires
us to treat the religious sentiment with respect.




One other consideration should not be overlooked -- a consideration which
students of Science more especially need to have pointed out. Occupied as
such are with established truths, and accustomed to regard things not already
known as things to be hereafter discovered, they are liable to forget that
information, however extensive it may become, can never satisfy inquiry.
Positive knowledge does not, and never can, fill the whole region of possible
thought. At the uttermost reach of discovery there arises, and must ever
arise, the question -- What lies beyond? As it is impossible to think of
a limit to space so as to exclude the idea of space lying outside that limit.
so we cannot conceive of any explanation profound enough to exclude the question
-- What is the explanation of that explanation? Regarding Science as a gradually
increasing sphere, we may say that every addition to its surface does not
bring it into wider contact with surrounding nescience. There must ever remain
therefore two antithetical modes of mental action. Throughout all future
time, as now, the human mind may occupy itself, not only with ascertained
phenomena and their relations, but also with that unascertained something
which phenomena and their relations imply. Hence if knowledge cannot monopolize
consciousness -- if it must always continue possible for the mind to dwell
upon that which transcends knowledge, then there can never cease to be a
place for something of the nature of Religion; since Religion under all its
forms is distinguished from everything else in this, that its subject matter
passes the sphere of the intellect.




Thus, however untenable may be the existing religious creeds, however
gross the absurdities associated with them, however irrational the arguments
set forth in their defence, we must not ignore the verity which in all likelihood
lies hidden within them. the general probability that widely-spread beliefs
are not absolutely baseless, is in this case enforced by a further probability
due to the omnipresence of the beliefs. In the existence of a religious sentiment,
whatever be its origin, we have a second evidence of great significance.
And as in that nescience which must ever remain the antithesis to science,
there is a sphere for the exercise of this sentiment, we find a third general
fact of like implication. We may be sure, therefore, that religions, even
though no one of them be actually true, are yet all adumbrations of a truth.




§5. As, to the religious, it will seem absurd to set forth any justification
for Religion, so, to the scientific, it will seem absurd to defend Science.
Yet to do the last is certainly as needful as to do the first. If there exist
some who, in contempt for its follies and disgust at its corruptions, have
contracted towards Religion a repugnance which makes them overlook the fundamental
truth contained in it; so, there are others offended to such a degree by
the destructive criticisms men of science make on the religious tenets they
hold essential, that they have acquired a strong prejudice against Science
at large. they are not prepared with any reasons for their dislike. they
have simply a remembrance of the rude shakes which Science has given to many
of their cherished convictions, and a suspicion that it may eventually uproot
all they regard as sacred; and hence it produces in them an inarticulate
dread.




What is Science? To see the absurdity of the prejudice against it, we
need only remark that Science is simply a higher development of common knowledge;
and that if Science is repudiated, all knowledge must be repudiated along
with it. The extremest bigot will not suspect any harm in the observation
that the Sun rises earlier and sets later in summer than in winter. but will
rather consider such an observation as a useful aid in fulfilling the duties
of life. Well, Astronomy is an organized body of kindred observations, made
with greater nicety, extended to a larger number of objects, and so analyzed
as to disclose the real arrangements of the heavens and to dispel our false
conceptions of them. That iron will rust in water, that wood will burn, that
long kept viands become putrid, the most timid sectarian will teach without
alarm, as things useful to be known. But these are chemical truths: Chemistry
is a systematized collection of such facts, ascertained with precision, and
so classified and generalized as to enable us to say with certainty, concerning
each simple or compound substance, what change will occur in it under given
conditions. And thus is it with all the sciences. They severally germinate
out of the experiences of daily life. insensibly as they grow they draw in
remoter, more numerous, and more complex experiences; and among these, they
ascertain laws of dependence like those which make up our knowledge of the
most familiar objects. Nowhere is it possible to draw a line and say -- here
Science begins. And as it is the function of common observation to serve
for the guidance of conduct; so, too, is the guidance of conduct the office
of the most recondite and abstract results of Science. Through the countless
industrial processes and the various modes of locomotion it has given to
us, Physics regulates more completely our social life than does his acquaintance
with the properties of surrounding bodies regulate the life of the savage.
All Science is prevision; and all prevision ultimately helps us in greater
or less degree to achieve the good and avoid the bad. Thus being one in origin
and function, the simplest forms of cognition and the most complex must be
dealt with alike. We are bound in consistency to receive the widest knowledge
our faculties can reach, or to reject along with it that narrow knowledge
possessed by all.




To ask the question which more immediately concerns our argument -- whether
Science is substantially true? -- is much like asking whether the Sun gives
light. And it is because they are conscious how undeniably valid are most
of its propositions, that the theological party regard Science with so much
secret alarm. They know that during the five thousand years of its growth,
some of its larger divisions -- mathematics, physics, astronomy -- have been
subject to the rigorous criticism of successive generations, and have notwithstanding
become ever more firmly established. They know that, unlike many of their
own doctrines, which were once universally received but have age by age been
more widely doubted, the doctrines of Science, at first confined to a few
scattered inquirers, have been slowly growing into general acceptance, and
are now in great part admitted as beyond dispute. They know that scientific
men throughout the world subject one another's results to searching examination;
and that error is mercilessly exposed and rejected as soon as discovered.
And, finally they know that still more conclusive evidence is furnished by
the daily verification of scientific predictions, and by the never-ceasing
triumphs of those arts which Science guides.




To regard with alienation that which has such high credentials is a folly.
Though in the tone which many of the scientific adopt towards them, the defenders
of Religion may find some excuse for this alienation, yet the excuse is an
insufficient one. On the side of Science, as on their own side, they must
admit that short-comings in the advocates do not tell essentially against
that which is advocated. Science must be judged by itself; and so judged,
only the most perverted intellect can fail to see that it is worthy of all
reverence. Be there or be there not any other revelation, we have a veritable
revelation in Science -- a continuous disclosure of the established order
of the Universe. This disclosure it is the duty of every one to verify as
far as in him lies; and having verified, to receive with all humility.




§6. Thus there must be right on both sides of this great controversy.
Religion, everywhere present as a warp running through the weft of human
history, expresses some eternal fact; while Science is an organized body
of truths, ever growing, and ever being purified from errors. And if both
have bases in the reality of things, then between them there must be a fundamental
harmony. It is impossible that there should be two orders of truth in absolute
and everlasting opposition. Only in pursuance of some Manichean hypothesis,
which among ourselves no one dares openly avow, is such a supposition even
conceivable. That Religion is divine and Science diabolical, is a proposition
which, though implied in many a clerical declamation, not the most vehement
fanatic can bring himself distinctly to assert. And whoever does not assert
this, must admit that under their seeming antagonism lies hidden an entire
agreement.




Each side, therefore, has to recognize the claims of the other as representing
truths which are not to be ignored. It behoves each to strive to understand
the other, with the conviction that the other has something worthy to be
understood; and with the conviction that when mutually recognized this something
will be the basis of a reconciliation.




How to find this something thus becomes the problem we should perseveringly
try to solve. Not to reconcile them in any makeshift way, but to establish
a real and permanent peace. The thing we have to seek out is that ultimate
truth which both will avow with absolute sincerity -- with not the remotest
mental reservation. There shall be no concession -- no yielding on either
side of something that will by-and-by be reasserted; but the common ground
on which they meet shall be one which each will maintain for itself. We have
to discover some fundamental verity which Religion will assert, with all
possible emphasis, in the absence of Science; and which Science, with all
possible emphasis, will assert in the absence of Religion. We must look for
a conception which combines the conclusions of both -- must see how Science
and Religion express opposite sides of the same fact: the one its near or
visible side, and the other its remote or invisible side.




Already in the foregoing pages the method of seeking such a reconciliation
has been vaguely shadowed forth. Before proceeding, however, it will be well
to treat the question of method more definitely. To find that truth in which
Religion and Science coalesce, we must know in what direction to look for
it, and what kind of truth it is likely to be.




§7. Only in some highly abstract proposition can Religion and Science
find a common ground. Neither such dogmas as those of the trinitarian and
unitarian, nor any such idea as that of propitiation, common though it may
be to all religions, can serve as the desired basis of agreement; for Science
cannot recognize beliefs like these: they lie beyond its sphere. Not only,
as we have inferred, is the essential truth contained in Religion that most
abstract element pervading all its forms, but, as we here see, this most
abstract element is the only one in which Religion is likely to agree with
Science.




Similarly if we begin at the other end, and inquire what scientific truth
can unite Science with Religion. Religion can take no cognizance of special
scientific doctrines; any more than Science can take cognizance of special
religious doctrines. The truth which Science asserts and Religion indorses
cannot be one furnished by mathematics; nor can it be a physical truth; nor
can it be a truth in chemistry. No generalization of the phenomena of space,
of time, of matter, or of force, can become a Religious conception. Such
a conception, if it anywhere exists in Science, must be more general than
any of these -- must be one underlying all of them.




Assuming, then, that since these two great realities are constituents
of the same mind, and respond to different aspects of the same Universe,
there must be a fundamental harmony between them, we see good reason to conclude
that the most abstract truth contained in Religion and the most abstract
truth contained in Science must be the one in which the two coalesce. The
largest fact to be found within our mental range must be the one of which
we are in search. Uniting these positive and negative poles of human thought,
it must be the ultimate fact in our intelligence.




§8. Before proceeding let me bespeak a little patience. The next
three chapters, setting out from different points and converging to the same
conclusion, will be unattractive. Students of philosophy will find in them
much that is familiar and to most of those who are unacquainted with modern
metaphysics, their reasonings may prove difficult to follow.




Our argument, however, cannot dispense with these chapters, and the greatness
of the question at issue justifies even a heavier tax on the reader's attention.
Though it affects us little in a direct way, the view we arrive at must indirectly
affect us all in our relations -- must determine Our conceptions of the Universe,
of Life, of Human Nature -- must influence our ideas of right and wrong,
and therefore modify our conduct. To reach that point of view from which
the seeming discordance of Religion and Science disappears, and the two merge
into one, must surely be worth an effort.




Here ending preliminaries let us now address ourselves to this all-important
inquiry.




Chapter 2




Ultimate Religious Ideas




§9. When, on the sea-shore, we note how the hulls of distant vessels
are hidden below the horizon, and how, of still remoter vessels, only the
uppermost sails are visible, we may conceive with tolerable clearness the
slight curvature of that portion of the sea's surface which lies before us.
But when we try to follow out in imagination this curved surface as it actually
exists, slowly bending round until all its meridians meet in a point eight
thousand miles below our feet, we find ourselves utterly baffled. We cannot
conceive in its real form and magnitude even that small segment of our globe
which extends a hundred miles on every side of us, much less the globe as
a whole. The piece of rock on which we stand can be mentally represented
with something like completeness: we are able to think of its top, its sides,
and its under surface at the same time, or so nearly at the same time that
they seem present in consciousness together; and so we can form what we call
a conception of the rock. But to do the like with the Earth is impossible.
If even to imagine the antipodes as at that distant place in space which
it actually occupies, is beyond our power much more beyond our power must
it be at the same time to imagine all other remote points on the Earth's
surface as in their actual places. Yet we commonly speak as though we had
an idea of the Earth -- as though we could think of it in the same way that
we think of minor objects.




What conception, then, do we form of it? the reader may ask. That its
name calls up in us some state of consciousness is unquestionable; and if
this state of consciousness is not a conception, properly so called, what
is it? The answer seems to be this: -- We have learnt by indirect methods
that the Earth is a sphere; we have formed models approximately representing
its shape and the distribution of its parts; usually when the Earth is referred
to, we either think of an indefinitely extended mass beneath our feet, or
else, leaving out the actual Earth, we think of a body like a terrestrial
globe; but when we seek to imagine the Earth as it really is, we join these
two ideas as well as we can -- such perception as our eyes give us of the
Earth's surface we couple with the conception of a sphere. And thus we form
of the Earth not a conception properly so called, but only a symbolic conception.(*)

<* Those who may have before met with this term, will perceive that it
is here used in quite a different sense.>




A large proportion of our conceptions, including all those of much generality,
are of this order. Great magnitudes, great durations, great numbers, are
none of them actually conceived, but are all of them conceived more or less
symbolically; and so, too, are all those classes of objects of which we predicate
some common fact. When mention is made of any individual man, a tolerably
complete idea of him is formed. If the family he belongs to be spoken of,
probably but a part of it will be represented in thought: under the necessity
of attending to that which is said about the family, we realize in imagination
only its most important or familiar members, and pass over the rest with
a nascent consciousness which we know could, if requisite, be made complete.
Should something be remarked of the class, say farmers, to which this family
belongs, we neither enumerate in thought all the individuals contained in
the class, nor believe that we could do so if required; but we are content
with taking some few samples of it, and remembering that these could be indefinitely
multiplied. Supposing the subject of which something is predicated be Englishmen,
the answering state of consciousness is a still more inadequate representative.
Yet more remote is the likeness of the thought to the thing, if reference
be made to Europeans or to human beings. And when we come to propositions
concerning the mammalia, or conceding the whole of the vertebrata, or concerning
all organic beings, the unlikenesses of our conceptions to the realities
become extreme.




Throughout which series of instances we see that as the number of objects
grouped together in thought increases, the concept, formed of a few typical
samples joined with the notion of multiplicity, becomes more and more a mere
symbol; not only because it gradually ceases to represent the size of the
group, but also because, as the group grows more heterogeneous, the typical
samples thought of are less like the average objects which the group contains.




This formation of symbolic conceptions, which inevitably arises as we
pass from small and concrete objects to large and to discrete ones, is mostly
a useful, and indeed necessary, process. When, instead of things whose attributes
can be tolerably well united in a single state of consciousness, we have
to deal with things whose attributes are too vast or numerous to be so united,
we must either drop in thought part of their attributes, or else not think
of them at all -- either form a more or less symbolic conception, or no conception.
We must predicate nothing of objects too great or too multitudinous to be
mentally represented, or we must make our predications by the help of extremely
inadequate representations of them.




But while by doing this we are enabled to form general propositions, and
so to reach general conclusions, we are perpetually led into danger, and
very often into error. We mistake our symbolic conceptions for real ones;
and so are betrayed into countless false inferences. Not only is it that
in proportion as the concept we form of any thing, or class of things, misrepresents
the reality, we are apt to be wrong in any assertion we make respecting the
reality; but it is that we are led to suppose we have truly conceived many
things which we have conceived only in this fictitious way; and then to confound
with these some things which cannot be conceived in any way. How we fall
into this error almost unavoidably it will be needful here to observe.




From objects fully representable, to those of which we cannot form even
approximate representations, there is an insensible transition. Between a
pebble and the entire Earth a series of magnitudes might be introduced, severally
differing from adjacent ones so slightly that it would be impossible to say
at what point in the series our conceptions of them became inadequate. Similarly,
there is a gradual progression from those groups of a few individuals which
we can think of as groups with tolerable completeness, to those larger and
larger groups of which we can form nothing like true ideas. Thus we pass
from actual conceptions to symbolic ones by infinitesimal steps. Note next
that we are led to deal with our symbolic conceptions as though they were
actual ones, not only because we cannot clearly separate the two, but also
because, in most cases, the first serve our purposes nearly or quite as well
as the last -- are simply the abbreviated signs we substitute for those more
elaborate signs which are our equivalents for real objects. Those imperfect
representations of ordinary things which we make in thinking, we know can
be developed into adequate ones if needful. Those concepts of larger magnitudes
and more extensive classes which we cannot make adequate, we still find can
be verified by some indirect process of measurement or enumeration. And even
in the case of such an utterly inconceivable object as the Solar System,
we yet, through the fulfilment of predictions founded on our symbolic conception
of it, gain the conviction that this stands for an actual existence, and,
in a sense, truly expresses certain of its constituent relations. So that
having learnt by long experience that our symbolic conceptions can, if needful,
be verified, we are led to accept them without verification. Thus we open
the door to some which profess to stand for known things, but which really
stand for things that cannot be known in any way.




The implication is clear. When our symbolic conceptions are such that
no cumulative or indirect processes of thought can enable us to ascertain
that there are corresponding actualities, nor any fulfilled predictions be
assigned in justification of them, then they are altogether vicious and illusive,
and in no way distinguishable from pure fictions.




§10. And now to consider the bearings of this general truth on our
immediate topic -- Ultimate Religious Ideas.




To the primitive man sometimes happen things which are out of the ordinary
course-diseases, storms, earth-quakes, echoes, eclipses. From dreams arises
the idea of a wandering double; whence follows the belief that the double,
departing permanently at death, is then a ghost. Ghosts thus become assignable
causes for strange occurrences. The greater ghosts are presently supposed
to have extended spheres of action. As men grow intelligent the conceptions
of these minor invisible agencies merge into the conception of a universal
invisible agency; and there result hypotheses concerning the origin, not
of special incidents only, but of things in general.




A critical examination, however will prove not only that no current hypothesis
is tenable, but also that no tenable hypothesis can be framed.




§11. Respecting the origin of the Universe three verbally intelligible
suppositions may be made. We may assert that it is self-existent; or that
it is self-created; or that it is created by an external agency. Which of
these suppositions is most credible it is not needful here to inquire. The
deeper question, into which this finally merges, is, whether any one of them
is even conceivable in the true sense of the word. Let us successively test
them.




When we speak of a man as self-supporting, of an apparatus as self-acting,
or of a tree as self-developed, our expressions, however inexact, stand for
things that can be figured in thought with tolerable completeness. Our conception
of the self-development of a tree is doubtless symbolic. But though we cannot
really represent in consciousness the. entire series of complex changes through
which the tree passes, yet we can thus represent the leading traits of the
series; and general experience teaches us that by long continued observation
we could gain the power of more fully representing it. That is, we know that
our symbolic conception of self-development can be expanded into something
like a real conception; and that it expresses, however rudely, an actual
process. But when we speak of self-existence and, helped by the above analogies,
form some vague symbolic conception of it, we delude ourselves in supposing
that this symbolic conception is of the same order as the others. On joining
the word self to the word existence, the force of association makes us believe
we have a thought like that suggested by the compound word self-acting. An
endeavour to expand this symbolic conception, however, will undeceive us.
In the first place, it is clear that by self-existence we especially mean
an existence independent of any other -- not produced by any other: the assertion
of self-existence is an indirect denial of creation. In thus excluding the
idea of any antecedent cause, we necessarily exclude the idea of a beginning.
for to admit that there was a time when the existence had not commenced,
is to admit that its commencement was determined by something, or was caused,
which is a contradiction. Self-existence, therefore, necessarily means existence
without a beginning; and to form a conception of self-existence is to form
a conception of existence without a beginning. Now by no mental effort can
we do this. To conceive existence through infinite past-time, implies the
conception of infinite past-time, which is an impossibility. To this let
us add that even were self-existence conceivable, it would not be an explanation
of the Universe. No one will say that the existence of an object at the present
moment is made easier to understand by the discovery that it existed an hour
ago, or a day ago, or a year ago; and if its existence now is not made more
comprehensible by knowledge of its existence during some previous finite
period, then no knowledge of it during many such finite periods, even could
we extend them to an infinite period, would make it more comprehensible.
Thus the Atheistic theory is not only absolutely unthinkable, but, even were
it thinkable, would not be a solution. The assertion that the Universe is
self-existent does not really carry us a step beyond the cognition of its
present existence; and so leaves us with a mere re-statement of the mystery.




The hypothesis of self-creation, which practically amounts to what is
called Pantheism, is similarly incapable of being represented in thought.
Certain phenomena, such as the precipitation of invisible vapour into cloud,
aid us in forming a symbolic conception of a self-evolved Universe; and there
are not wanting indications in the Heavens, and on the Earth, which help
us in giving to this conception some distinctness. But while the succession
of phases through which the visible Universe has passed in reaching its present
form, may perhaps be comprehended as in a sense self-determined; yet the
impossibility of expanding our symbolic conception of self-creation into
a real conception, remains as complete as ever. Really to conceive self-creation,
is to conceive potential existence passing into actual existence by some
inherent necessity, which we cannot. We cannot form any idea of a potential
existence of the Universe, as distinguished from its actual existence. If
represented in thought at all, potential existence must be represented as
something, that is, as an actual existence: to suppose that it can be represented
as nothing involves two absurdities -- that nothing is more than a negation,
and can be positively represented in thought, and that one nothing is distinguished
from all other nothings by its power to develop into something. Nor is this
all. We have no state of consciousness answering to the words an inherent
necessity by which potential existence became actual existence. To render
them into thought, existence, having for an indefinite period remained in
one form, must be conceived as passing without any external impulse into
another form; and this involves the idea of a change without a cause -- a
thing of which no idea is possible. Thus the terms of this hypothesis do
not stand for real thoughts, but merely suggest the vaguest symbols not admitting
of any interpretation. Moreover, even were potential existence conceivable
as a different thing from actual existence, and could the transition from
the one to the other be mentally realized as self-determined, we should still
be no forwarder: the problem would simply be removed a step back. For whence
the potential existence? This would just as much require accounting for as
actual existence, and just the same difficulties would meet us. The self-existence
of a potential Universe is no more conceivable than the self-existence of
the actual Universe. The self-creation of a potential Universe would involve
over again the difficulties just stated -- would imply behind this potential
universe a more remote potentiality, and so on in an infinite series, leaving
us at last no forwarder than at first. While to assign an externa1 agency
as its origin, would be to introduce the notion of a potential Universe for
no purpose whatever.




There remains the commonly -- received or theistic hypothesis -- creation
by external agency. Alike in the rudest creeds and in the cosmogony long
current among ourselves, it is assumed that the Heavens and the Earth were
made somewhat after the manner in which a workman makes a piece of furniture.
And this is the assumption not only of theologians but of most philosophers.
Equally in the writings of Plato and in those of not a few living men of
science, we find it assumed that there is an analogy between the process
of creation and the process of manufacture. Now not only is this conception
one which cannot by any cumulative process of thought, or the fulfilment
of predictions based on it, be shown to answer to anything actual; but it
cannot be mentally realized, even when all its assumptions are granted. Though
the proceedings of a human artificer may vaguely symbolize a method after
which the Universe might be shaped, yet imagination of this method does not
help us to solve the ultimate problem; namely, the origin of the materials
of which the Universe consists. The artizan does not make the iron, wood,
or stone, he uses, but merely fashions and combines them. If we suppose suns,
and planets, and satellites, and all they contain to have been similarly
formed by a "Great Artificer," we suppose merely that certain pre-existing
elements were thus put into their present arrangement. But whence the pre-existing
elements? The production of matter out of nothing is the real mystery which
neither this simile nor any other enables us to conceive; and a simile which
does not enable us to conceive this may as well be dispensed with. Still
more manifest becomes the insufficiency of this theory of things, when we
turn from material objects to that which contains them -- when instead of
matter we contemplate space. Did there exist nothing but an immeasurable
void, explanation would be needed as much as it is now. There would still
arise the question -- how came it so? If the theory of creation by external
agency were an adequate one, it would supply an answer; and its answer would
be -- space was made in the same manner that matter was made. But the impossibility
of conceiving this is so manifest that no one dares to assert it. For if
space was created it must have been previously non-existent. The non-existence
of space cannot, however, by any mental effort be imagined. And if the non-existence
of space is absolutely inconceivable, then, necessarily, its creation is
absolutely inconceivable. Lastly, even supposing that the genesis of the
Universe could really be represented in thought as due to an external agency,
the mystery would be as great as ever; for there would still arise the question
-- how came there to be an external agency? To account for this only the
same three hypotheses are possible -- self-existence, self-creation, and
creation by external agency. Of these the last is useless: it commits us
to an infinite series of such agencies, and even then leaves us where we
were. By the second we are led into the same predicament; since, as already
shown, self-creation implies an infinite series of potential existences.
We are obliged, therefore, to fall back on the first, which is the one commonly
accepted and commonly supposed to be satisfactory. Those who cannot conceive
a self-existent Universe, and therefore assume a creator as the source of
the Universe, take for granted that they can conceive a self-existent Creator.
The mystery which they recognize in this great fact surrounding them on every
side, they transfer to an alleged source of this great fact, and then suppose
that they have solved the mystery. But they delude themselves. As was proved
at the outset of the argument, self-existence is inconceivable; and this
holds true whatever be the nature of the object of which it is predicated.
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.




Thus these three different suppositions, verbally intelligible though
they are, and severally seeming to their respective adherents quite rational,
turn out, when critically examined, to be literally unthinkable. It is not
a question of probability, or credibility, but of conceivability. Experiment
proves that the elements of these hypotheses cannot even be put together
in consciousness; and we can entertain them only as we entertain such pseud-ideas
as a square fluid and a moral substance -- only by abstaining from the endeavour
to render them into actual thoughts. Or, reverting to our original mode of
statement, we may say that they severally involve symbolic conceptions of
the illegitimate and illusive kind. Differing so widely as they seem to do,
the atheistic, the pantheistic, and the theistic hypotheses contain the same
ultimate element. It is impossible to avoid making the assumption of self-existence
somewhere; and whether that assumption be made nakedly or under complicated
disguises, it is equally vicious, equally unthinkable. Be it a fragment of
matter, or some fancied potential form of matter, or some more remote and
still less imaginable mode of being, our conception of its self-existence
can be framed only by joining with it the notion of unlimited duration through
past time. And as unlimited duration is inconceivable, all those formal ideas
into which it enters are inconceivable; and indeed, if such an expression
is allowable, are the more inconceivable in proportion as the other elements
of the ideas are indefinite. So that in fact, impossible as it is to think
of the actual Universe as self-existing, we do but multiply impossibilities
of thought by every attempt we make to explain its existence.




§12. If from the origin of the Universe we turn to its nature, the
like insurmountable difficulties rise up before us on all sides -- or rather,
the same difficulties under new aspects. We find ourselves obliged to make
certain assumptions; and yet we find these assumptions cannot be represented
in thought.




When we inquire what is the meaning of the effects produced on our senses
-- when we ask how there come to be in our consciousness impressions of sounds,
of colours, of tastes, and of those various attributes we ascribe to bodies,
we are compelled to regard them as the effects of some cause. We may stop
short in the belief that this cause is what we call matter. Or we may conclude,
as some do, that matter is only a certain mode of manifestation of spirit,
which is therefore the true cause. Or, regarding matter and spirit as proximate
agencies, we may ascribe the changes wrought in our consciousness to immediate
divine power. But be the cause we assign what it may, we are obliged to suppose
some cause. And we are obliged not only to suppose some cause, but also a
first cause. The matter, or spirit or other agent producing these impressions
on us, must either be the first cause of them or not. If it is the first
cause the conclusion is reached. If it is not the first cause, then by implication
there must be a cause behind it, which thus becomes the real cause of the
effect. Manifestly however complicated the assumptions, the same conclusion
must be reached. We cannot ask how the changes in our consciousness are caused,
without inevitably committing ourselves to the hypothesis of a First Cause.




But now if we ask what is the nature of this First Cause, we are driven
by an inexorable logic to certain further conclusions. Is the First Cause
finite or infinite? If we say finite we involve ourselves in a dilemma. To
think of the First Cause as finite, is to think of it as limited. To think
of it as limited implies a consciousness of something beyond its limits:
it is impossible to conceive a thing as bounded without assuming a region
surrounding its boundaries. What now must we say of this region? If the First
Cause is limited, and there consequently lies something outside of it, this
something must have no First Cause -- must be uncaused. But if we admit that
there can be something uncaused, there is no reason to assume a cause for
anything. If beyond that finite region over which the First Cause extends,
there lies a region, which we are compelled to regard as infinite, over which
it does not extend -- if we admit that there is an infinite uncaused surrounding
the finite caused; we tacitly abandon the hypothesis of causation altogether.
Thus it is impossible to consider the First Cause as finite. But if it cannot
be finite it must be infinite.




Another inference conceding the First Cause is equally necessary. It must
be independent. If it is dependent it cannot be the First Cause; for that
must be the First Cause on which it depends. It is not enough to say that
it is partially independent; since this implies some necessity which determines
its partial dependence, and this necessity, be it what it may, must be a
higher cause, or the true First Cause, which is a contradiction. But to think
of the First Cause as totally independent, is to think of it as that which
exists in the absence of all other existence; seeing that if the presence
of any other existence is necessary, it must be partially dependent on that
other existence, and so cannot be the First Cause. Not only however must
the First Cause be a form of being which has no necessary relation to any
other form of being, but it can have no necessary relation within itself.
There can be nothing in it which determines change, and yet nothing which
prevents change. For if it contains something which imposes such necessities
or restraints, this something must be a cause higher than the First Cause,
which is absurd. Thus the First Cause must be in every sense perfect, complete,
total: including within itself all power and transcending all law. Or to
use the established word, it must be Absolute.




Certain conclusions respecting the nature of the Universe, thus seem unavoidable.
In our search after causes, we discover no resting place until we arrive
at a First Cause; and we have no alternative but to regard this First Cause
as Infinite and Absolute. These are inferences forced on us by arguments
from which there appears no escape. Nevertheless neither arguments nor inferences
have more than nominal values. It might easily be shown that the materials
of which the arguments are built, equally with the conclusions based on them,
are merely symbolic conceptions of the illegitimate order. Instead, however,
of repeating the disproof used above, it will be well to pursue another method;
showing the fallacy of these conclusions by disclosing their mutual contradictions.




Here I cannot do better than avail myself of the demonstration which Mr.
Mansel, carrying out in detail the doctrine of Sir William Hamilton, has
given in his Limits of Religious Thought. And I gladly do this, not only
because his mode of presentation cannot be improved, but also because, writing
as he does in defence of the current Theology, his reasonings will be the
more acceptable to the majority of readers.




§13. Having given preliminary definitions of the First Cause, of
the Infinite, and of the Absolute, Mr. Mansel says: --




"But these three conceptions, the Cause, the Absolute, the Infinite,
all equally indispensable, do they not imply contradiction to each other,
when viewed in conjunction, as attributes of one and the same Being? A Cause
cannot, as such, be absolute: the Absolute cannot, as such, be a cause. The
cause, as such, exists only in relation to its effect: the cause is a cause
of the effect; the effect is an effect of the cause. On the other hand, the
conception of the Absolute implies a possible existence out of all relation.
We attempt to escape from this apparent contradiction, by introducing the
idea of succession in time. The Absolute exists first by itself, and afterwards
becomes a Cause. But here we are checked by the third conception, that of
the Infinite. How can the Infinite become that which it was not from the
first? If Causation is a possible mode of existence, that which exists without
causing is not infinite; that which becomes a cause has passed beyond its
former limits. * * *




"Supposing the Absolute to become a cause, it will follow that it
operates by means of freewill and consciousness. For a necessary cause cannot
be conceived as absolute and infinite. If necessitated by something beyond
itself, it is thereby limited by a superior power; and if necessitated by
itself, it has in its own nature a necessary relation to its effect. The
act of causation must therefore be voluntary; and volition is only possible
in a conscious being. But consciousness again is only conceivable as a relation.
There must be a conscious subject, and an object of which he is conscious.
The subject is a subject to the object; the object is an object to the subject;
and neither can exist by itself as the absolute. This difficulty, again,
may be for the moment evaded, by distinguishing between the absolute as related
to another and the absolute as related to itself. The Absolute, it may be
said, may possibly be conscious, provided it is only conscious of itself.
But this alternative is, in ultimate analysis, no less self-destructive than
the other. For the object of consciousness, whether a mode of the Subject's
existence or not, is either created in and by the act of consciousness, or
has an existence independent of it. In the former case, the object depends
upon the subject, and the subject alone is the true absolute. In the latter
case, the subject depends upon the object, and the object alone is the true
absolute. Or if we attempt a third hypothesis, and maintain that each exists
independently of the other, we have no absolute at all, but only a pair of
relatives; for coexistence, whether in consciousness or not, is itself a
relation.




"The corollary from this reasoning is obvious. Not only is the Absolute,
as conceived, incapable of a necessary relation to anything else but it is
also incapable of containing, by the constitution of its own nature, an essential
relation within itself; as a whole, for instance, composed of parts, or as
a substance consisting of attributes, or as a conscious subject in antithesis
to an object. For if there is in the absolute any principle of unity, distinct
from the mere accumulation of parts or attributes, this principle alone is
the true absolute. If, on the other hand, there is no such principle, then
there is no absolute at all, but only a plurality of relatives. The almost
unanimous voice of philosophy, in pronouncing that the absolute is both one
and simple, must be accepted as the voice of reason also, so far as reason
has any voice in the matter. But this absolute unity, as indifferent and
containing no attributes, can neither be distinguished from the multiplicity
of finite beings by any characteristic feature, nor be identified with them
in their multiplicity. Thus we are landed in an inextricable dilemma. The
Absolute cannot be conceived as conscious, neither can it be conceived as
unconscious; it cannot be conceived as complex, neither can it be conceived
as simple: it cannot be conceived by difference, neither can it be conceived
by the absence of difference: it cannot be identified with the universe,
neither can it be distinguished from it. The One and the Many, regarded as
the beginning of existence, are thus alike incomprehensible.




"The fundamental conceptions of Rational Theology being thus self-destructive,
we may naturally expect to find the same antagonism manifested in their special
applications. * * * How, for example. Can Infinite Power be able to do all
things, and yet Infinite Goodness be unable to do evil? How can Infinite
Justice exact the utmost penalty for every sin, and yet Infinite Mercy pardon
the sinner? How can Infinite Wisdom know all that is to come, and yet Infinite
Freedom be at liberty to do or to forbear? How is the existence of Evil compatible
with that of an infinitely perfect Being; for if he wills it, he is not infinitely
good; and if he will it not, his will is thwarted and his sphere of action
limited? * * *




"Let us, however, suppose for an instant that these difficulties
are surmounted, and the existence of the Absolute securely established on
the testimony of reason. Still we have not succeeded in reconciling this
idea with that of a Cause: we have done nothing towards explaining how the
absolute can give rise to the relative, the infinite to the finite. If the
condition of causal activity is a higher state than that of quiescence, the
Absolute, whether acting voluntarily or involuntarily, has passed from a
condition of comparative imperfection to one of comparative perfection; and
therefore was not originally perfect. If the state of activity is an inferior
state to that of quiescence, the Absolute, in becoming a cause, has lost
its original perfection. There remains only the supposition that the two
states are equal, and the act of creation one of complete indifference. But
this supposition annihilates the unity of the absolute, or it annihilates
itself. If the act of creation is real, and yet indifferent, we must admit
the possibility of two conceptions of the absolute, the one as productive,
the other as non-productive. If the act is not real, the supposition itself
vanishes. * * *




"Again, how can the relative be conceived as coming into being? If
it is a distinct reality from the absolute, it must be conceived as passing
from non-existence into existence. But to conceive an object as non-existent,
is again a self-contradiction; for that which is conceived exists, as an
object of thought, in and by that conception. We may abstain from thinking
of an object at all; but, if we think of it, we cannot but think of it as
existing. It is possible at one time not to think of an object at all, and
at another to think of it as already in being; but to think of it in the
act of becoming, in the progress from not being into being, is to think that
which, in the very thought, annihilates itself. * * *




"To sum up briefly this portion of my argument. The conception of
the Absolute and Infinite, from whatever side we view it, appears encompassed
with contradictions. There is a contradiction in supposing such an object
to exist, whether alone or in conjunction with others; and there is a contradiction
in supposing it not to exist. There is a contradiction in conceiving it as
one; and there is a contradiction in conceiving it as many. There is a contradiction
in conceiving it as personal; and there is a contradiction in conceiving
it as impersonal. It cannot, without contradiction, be represented as active;
nor, without equal contradiction, be represented as inactive. It cannot be
conceived as the sum of all existence; nor yet can it be conceived as a part
only of that sum."




§14. And now what is the bearing of these results on the question
before us? Our examination of Ultimate Religious Ideas has been carried on
with the view of making manifest some fundamental verity contained in them.
Thus far, however, we have arrived at negative conclusions only. Passing
over the consideration of credibility, and confining ourselves to that of
conceivability we have seen that Atheism, Pantheism, and Theism, when rigorously
analyzed, severally prove to be wholly unthinkable. Instead of disclosing
a fundamental verity existing in each, our inquiry seems rather to have shown
that there is no fundamental verity contained in any. To carry away this
conclusion, however, would be a fatal error, as we shall shortly see.




Leaving out the accompanying code of conduct, which is a supplementary
growth, a religious creed is definable as a theory of original causation.
By the lowest savages the genesis of things is not inquired about: only strange
appearances and actions raise the question of agency. But be it in the primitive
Ghost-theory, which assumes a human personality behind each unusual phenomenon;
be it in Polytheism, in which such personalities are partially generalized;
be it in Monotheism, in which they are wholly generalized; or be it in Pantheism,
in which the generalized personality becomes one with the phenomena; we equally
find an hypothesis which is supposed to render the Universe comprehensible.
Nay, even that which is regarded as the negation of all Religion -- even
positive Atheism -- comes within the definition; for it, too, in asserting
the self-existence of Space, Matter and Motion, propounds a theory from which
it holds the facts to be deducible. Now every theory tacitly asserts two
things: first, that there is something to be explained; second, that such
and such is the explanation. Hence, however widely different speculators
disagree in the solutions they give of the same problem, yet by implication
they agree that there is a problem to be solved. Here then is an element
which all creeds have in common. Religions diametrically opposed in their
overt dogmas, are perfectly at one in the tacit conviction that the existence
of the world with all it contains and all which surrounds it, is a mystery
calling for interpretation.




Thus we come within sight of that which we seek. In the last chapter,
reasons were given for inferring that human beliefs in general, and especially
the perennial ones, contain, under whatever disguises of error, some soul
of truth; and here we have arrived at a truth underlying even the rudest
beliefs. We saw, further, that this soul of truth is most likely some constituent
common to conflicting opinions of the same order; and here we have a constituent
contained by all religions. It was pointed out that this soul of truth would
almost certainly be more abstract than any of the creeds involving it; and
the truth above reached is one exceeding in abstractness the most abstract
religious doctrines. In every respect, therefore, our conclusion answers
to the requirements.




That this is the vital element in all religions is further shown by the
fact that it is the element which not only survives every change but grows
more distinct the more highly the religion is developed. Aboriginal creeds,
pervaded by thoughts of personal agencies which are usually unseen, conceive
these agencies under perfectly concrete and ordinary forms-class them with
the visible agencies of men and animals; and so hide a vague perception of
mystery in disguises as unmysterious as possible. Polytheistic conceptions
in their advanced phases, represent the presiding personalities in idealized
shapes, working in subtle ways, and communicating with men by omens or through
inspired persons; that is, the ultimate causes of things are regarded as
less familiar and comprehensible. The growth of a Monotheistic faith, accompanied
as it is by lapse of those beliefs in which the divine nature is assimilated
to the human in all its lower propensities, shows us a further step in the
same direction; and however imperfectly this higher faith is at first held,
we yet see in altars "to the unknown and unknowable God," and in
the worship of a God who cannot by any searching be found out, that there
is a clearer recognition of the inscrutableness of creation. Further developments
of theology, ending in such assertions as that "a God understood would
be no God at all," and "to think that God is, as we can think him
to be, is blasphemy," exhibit this recognition still more distinctly.
It pervades all the cultivated theology of the present day. So that while
other elements of religious creeds one by one drop away, this remains and
grows ever more manifest, and thus is shown to be the essential element.




Here, then, is a truth in which religions in general agree with one another,
and with a philosophy antagonistic to their special dogmas. If Religion and
Science are to be reconciled, the basis of reconciliation must be this deepest,
widest, and most certain of all facts-that the Power which the Universe manifests
to us is inscrutable.




Chapter 3




Ultimate Scientific Ideas




§15. What are Space and Time? Two hypotheses are current respecting
them: the one that they are objective, the other that they are subjective.
Let us see what becomes of these hypotheses under analysis.




To say that Space and Time exist objectively, is to say that they are
entities. The assertion that they are non-entities is self-destructive: non-entities
are non-existences; and to allege that non-existences exist objectively is
a contradiction in terms. Moreover, to deny that Space and Time are things,
and so by implication to call them nothings, involves the absurdity that
there are two kinds of nothing. Neither can they be regarded as attributes
of some entity. Not only is it impossible to conceive any entity of which
they are attributes, but we cannot think of them as disappearing, even if
everything else disappeared; whereas attributes necessarily disappear along
with the entities they belong to. Thus as Space and Time can be neither non-entities
nor the attributes of entities, we are compelled to consider them as entities.
But while, on the hypothesis of their objectivity, Space and Time must be
classed as things, we find that to represent them in thought as things is
impossible. To be conceived at all, a thing must be conceived as having attributes.
We can distinguish something from nothing, only by the power which the something
has to act on our consciousness. The effects it mediately or immediately
produces on our consciousness we attribute to it, and call its attributes;
and the absence of these attributes is the absence of the terms in which
the something is conceived, and involves the absence of a conception. What,
now, are the attributes of Space? The only one which it is possible to think
of as belonging to it is that of extension, and to credit it with this is
to identify object and attribute. For extension and Space are convertible
terms: by extension, as we ascribe it to surrounding objects, we mean occupancy
of Space; and thus to say that Space is extended, is to say that Space occupies
Space. How we are similarly unable to assign any attribute to Time, scarcely
needs pointing out. Nor are Time and Space unthinkable as entities only from
the absence of attributes. There is another peculiarity, familiar to most
people, which equally excludes them from the category. All entities actually
known as such, are limited; and even if we suppose ourselves either to know
or to be able to conceive some unlimited entity, we necessarily in so classing
it separate it from the class of limited entities. But of Space and Time
we cannot assert either limitation or the absence of limitation. We find
ourselves unable to form any mental image of unbounded Space; and yet are
unable to imagine bounds beyond which there is no Space. Similarly at the
other extreme: it is impossible to think of a limit to the divisibility of
Space; yet equally impossible to think of its infinite divisibility. And,
without stating them, it will be seen that we labour under like impotences
in respect to Time. Thus we cannot conceive Space and Time as entities, and
are equally disabled from conceiving them as either the attributes of entities
or as non-entities. We are compelled to think of them as existing, and yet
cannot bring them within those conditions under which existences are represented
in thought.




Shall we then take refuge in the Kantian doctrine? Shall we say that Space
and Time are forms of the intellect, -- "a priori laws or conditions
of the conscious mind?" To do this is to escape from great difficulties
by rushing into greater. The proposition with which Kant's philosophy sets
out, verbally intelligible though it is, cannot by any effort be rendered
into thought -- cannot be interpreted into an idea properly so called, but
stands merely for a pseud-idea. In the first place, to assert that Space
and Time are subjective conditions is, by implication, to assert that they
are not objective realities: if the Space and Time present to our minds belong
to the ego, then of necessity they do not belong to the non-ego. Now it is
impossible to think this. The very fact on which Kant bases his hypothesis
-- namely that our consciousness of Space and Time cannot be suppressed --
testifies as much; for that consciousness of Space and Time which we cannot
rid ourselves of, is the consciousness of them as existing objectively. It
is useless to reply that such an inability must inevitably result if they
are subjective forms. The question here is -- What does consciousness directly
testify? And the direct testimony of consciousness is, that Time and Space
are not within the mind but without the mind; and so absolutely independent
that we cannot conceive them to become non-existent even supposing the mind
to become non-existent. Besides being positively unthinkable in what it tacitly
denies, the theory of Kant is equally unthinkable in what it openly affirms.
It is not simply that we cannot combine the thought of Space with the thought
of our own personality, and contemplate the one as a property of the other
-- though our inability to do this would prove the inconceivableness of the
hypothesis -- but it is that the hypothesis carries in itself the proof of
its own inconceivableness. For if Space and Time are forms of intuition,
they can never be intuited; since it is impossible for anything to be at
once the form of intuition and the matter of intuition. That Space and Time
are objects of consciousness, Kant emphatically asserts by saying that it
is impossible to suppress the consciousness of them. How then, if they are
objects of consciousness, can they at the same time be conditions of consciousness?
If Space and Time are the conditions under which we think, then when we think
of Space and Time themselves, our thoughts must be unconditioned; and if
there can thus be unconditioned thoughts, what becomes of the theory?




It results, therefore, that Space and Time are wholly incomprehensible.
The immediate knowledge which we seem to have of them proves, when examined,
to be total ignorance. While our belief in their objective reality is insurmountable,
we are unable to give any rational account of it. And to posit the alternative
belief (possible to state but impossible to realize) is merely to multiply
irrationalities.




§16. Were it not for the necessities of the argument, it would be
inexcusable to occupy the reader's attention with the threadbare, and yet
unended, controversy respecting the divisibility of matter. Matter is either
infinitely divisible or it is not: no third possibility can be named. Which
of the alternatives shall we accept? If we say that Matter is infinitely
divisible, we commit ourselves to a supposition not realizable in thought.
We can bisect and re-bisect a body, and continually repeating the act until
we reduce its parts to a size no longer physically divisible, may then mentally
continue the process. To do this, however, is not really to conceive the
infinite divisibility of matter, but to form a symbolic conception not admitting
of expansion into a real one, and not admitting of other verification. Really
to conceive the infinite divisibility of matter, is mentally to follow out
the divisions to infinity. and to do this would require infinite time. On
the other hand, to assert that matter is not infinitely divisible, is to
assert that it is reducible to parts which no power can divide; and this
verbal supposition can no more be represented in thought than the other.
For each of such ultimate parts, did they exist, must have an under and an
upper surface, a right and a left side, like any larger fragment. Now it
is impossible to imagine its sides so near that no plane of section can be
conceived between them; and however great be the assumed force of cohesion,
it is impossible to shut out the idea of a greater force capable of overcoming
it. So that to human intelligence the one hypothesis is no more acceptable
than the other; and yet the conclusion that one or other must agree with
the fact, seems to human intelligence unavoidable.




Again, let us ask whether substance has anything like that extended solidity
which it presents to our consciousness. The portion of space occupied by
a piece of metal, seems to eyes and fingers perfectly filled: we perceive
a homogeneous, resisting mass, without any breach of continuity. Shall we
then say that Matter is actually as solid as it appears? Shall we say that
whether it consists of an infinitely divisible element or of units which
cannot be further divided, its parts are everywhere in actual contact? To
assert as much entangles us in insuperable difficulties. Were Matter thus
absolutely solid it would be -- what it is not -- absolutely incompressible;
since compressibility, implying the nearer approach of constituent parts,
is not thinkable unless there is unoccupied space among the parts.




The supposition that Matter is absolutely solid being untenable, there
presents itself the Newtonian supposition, that it consists of solid atoms
not in contact but acting on one another by attractive and repulsive forces,
varying with the distances. To assume this, however, merely shifts the difficulty.
For granting that Matter as we perceive it, is made up of dense extended
units attracting and repelling, the question still arises -- What is the
constitution of these units? We must regard each of them as a small piece
of matter. Looked at through a mental microscope, each becomes a mass such
as we have just been contemplating. Just the same inquiries may be made respecting
the parts of which each atom consists; while just the same difficulties stand
in the way of every answer. Even were the hypothetical atom assumed to consist
of still minuter ones, the difficulty would reappear at the next step; and
so on perpetually.




Boscovich's conception yet remains to us. Seeing that Matter could not,
as Leibnitz suggested, be composed of unextended monads (since the juxtaposition
of an infinity of points having no extension could not produce that extension
which matter possesses), and perceiving objections to the view entertained
by Newton, Boscovich proposed an intermediate theory. This theory is that
the constituents of Matter are centres of force -- points without dimensions
-- which attract and repel one another in such wise as to be kept at specific
distances apart. And he argues, mathematically, that the forces possessed
by such centres might so vary with the distances that, under given conditions,
the centres would remain in stable equilibrium with definite interspaces;
and yet, under other conditions, would maintain larger or smaller interspaces.
This speculation, however, escapes all the inconceivabilities above indicated
by merging them in the one inconceivability with which it sets cut. A centre
of force absolutely without extension is unthinkable. The idea of resistance
cannot be separated in thought from the idea of something which offers resistance,
and this something must be thought of as occuppying space. To suppose that
central forces can reside in points having positions only, with nothing to
mark their positions -- points in no respect distinguishable from surrounding
points which are not centres of force -- is beyond human power.




But though the conception of Matter as consisting of dense indivisible
units is symbolic, and cannot by any effort be thought out, it may yet be
supposed to find indirect verification in the truths of chemistry. These,
it is argued, necessitate the belief that Matter consists of particles of
specific weights, and therefore of specific sizes. The law of definite proportions
seems impossible on any other condition than the existence of ultimate atoms;
and though the combining weights of the respective elements are termed by
chemists their "equivalents," for the purpose of avoiding a questionable
assumption, we are unable to think of the combination of such definite weights,
without supposing it to take place between definite molecules. Thus it would
appear that the Newtonian view is at any rate preferable to that of Boscovich.
A disciple of Boscovich, however, may reply that his master's theory is involved
in that of Newton, and cannot indeed be escaped. "What holds together
the parts of these ultimate atoms?" he may ask. "A cohesive force,"
his opponent must answer. "And what," he may continue, "holds
together the parts of any fragments into which, by sufficient force, an ultimate
atom might be broken?" Again the answer must be -- a cohesive force.
"And what," he may still ask, "if the ultimate atom were reduced
to parts as small in proportion to it, as it is in proportion to a tangible
mass of matter -- what must give each part the ability to sustain itself?"
Still there is no answer but -- a cohesive force. Carry on the mental process
and we can find no limit until we arrive at the symbolic conception of centres
of force without any extension.




Matter then, in its ultimate nature, is as absolutely incomprehensible
as Space and Time. Whatever supposition we frame leaves us nothing but a
choice between opposite absurdities.*




<* To discuss Lord Kelvin's hvpothesis of vortex-atoms, from the scientific
point of view, is beyond my ability. From the philosophical point of view,
however I may say that since it postulates a homogeneous medium which is
strictly continuous (non-molecular), which is incompressible, which is a
perfect fluid in the sense of having no viscosity, and which has inertia,
it sets out with what appears to me an inconceivability. A fluid which has
inertia, implying mass, and which is yet absolutely frictionless. so that
its parts move among one another without any loss of motion, cannot be truly
represented in consciousness. Even were it otherwise, the hypothesis is held
by Prof. Clerk Maxwell to be untenable (see art. "Atom," Ency.
Brit.).>




§17. A body impelled by the hand is perceived to move, and to move
in a definite direction; doubt about its motion seems impossible. Yet we
not only may be, but usually are, quite wrong in both these judgments. Here,
for instance, is a ship which we will suppose to be anchored at the equator
with her head to the West. When the captain walks from stem to stern, in
what direction does he move? East is the obvious answer -- an answer which
for the moment may pass without criticism. But now the anchor is heaved,
and the vessel sails to the West with a velocity equal to that at which




the captain walks. In what direction does he now move when he goes from
stem to stern? You cannot say East, for the vessel is carrying him as fast
towards the West as he walks to the East; and you cannot say West for the
converse reason In respect to things outside the vessel he is stationary,
though to all on board he seems to be moving. But now are we quite sure of
this conclusion? -- Is he really stationary? On taking into account the Earth's
motion round its axis, we find that he is travelling at the rate of 1000
miles per hour to the East; so that neither the perception of one who looks
at him, nor the inference of one who allows for the ship's motion, is anything
like right. Nor indeed, on further consideration, do we find this revised
conclusion to be much better. For we have not allowed for the Earth's motion
in its orbit. This being some 68,000 miles per hour, it follows that, assuming
the time to be midday, he is moving, not at the rate of 1000 miles per hour
to the East, but at the rate of 67,000 miles per hour to the East. Nay not
even now have we discovered the true rate and the true direction of his movement.
With the Earth's progress in its orbit, we have to join that of the whole
Solar system towards the constellation Hercules. When we do this, we perceive
that he is moving neither East nor West, but in a line inclined to the plane
of the Ecliptic, and at a velocity greater or less (according to the time
of the year) than that above named. And were the constitution of our Sidereal
System fully known, we should probably discover the direction and rate of
his actual movement to differ considerably even from these. Thus we are taught
that what we are conscious of is not the real motion of any object, either
in its rate or direction, but merely its motion as measured from an assigned
position -- either our own or some other. Yet in this very process of concluding
that the motions we perceive are not the real motions, we tacitly assume
that there are real motions. We take for granted that there is an absolute
course and an absolute velocity and we find it impossible to rid ourselves
of this idea. Nevertheless, absolute motion cannot even be imagined, much
less known. Apart from those marks in space which we habitually associate
with it, motion is unthinkable. For motion is change of place; but in space
without marks, change of place is inconceivable, because place itself is
inconceivable. Place can be conceived only by reference to other places;
and in the absence of objects dispersed through space, a place could be conceived
only in relation to the limits of space; whence it follows that in unlimited
space, place cannot be conceived -- all places must be equidistant from boundaries
which do not exist. Thus while obliged to think that there is an absolute
motion, we find absolute motion cannot be represented in thought.




Another insuperable difficulty presents itself when we contemplate the
transfer of Motion. Habit blinds us to the marvellousness of this phenomenon.
Familiar with the fact from childhood, we see nothing remarkable in the ability
of a moving thing to generate movement in a thing that is stationary. It
is, however, impossible to understand it. In what respect does a body after
impact differ from itself before impact? What is this added to it which does
not sensibly affect any of its properties and yet enables it to traverse
space? Here is an object at rest and here is the same object moving. In the
one state it has no tendency to change its place, but in the other it is
obliged at each instant to assume a new position. What is it which will for
ever go on producing this effect without being exhausted? and how does it
dwell in the object? The motion you say has been communicated. But how? --
What has been communicated? The striking body has not transferred a thing
to the body struck; and it is equally out of the question to say that it
has transferred an attribute. What then has it transferred?




Once more there is the old puzzle concerning the connexion between Motion
and Rest. A body travelling at a given velocity cannot be brought to a state
of rest, or no velocity, without passing through all intermediate velocities.
It is quite possible to think of its motion as diminishing insensibly until
it becomes infinitesimal; and many will think equally possible to pass in
thought from infinitesimal motion to no motion. But this is an error. Mentally
follow out the decreasing velocity as long as you please, and there still
remains some velocity; and the smallest movement is separated by an impassable
gap from no movement. As something, however minute, is infinitely great in
comparison with nothing; so is even the least conceivable motion infinite
as compared with rest.




Thus neither when considered in connexion with Space, nor when considered
in connexion with Matter, nor when considered in connexion with Rest, do
we find that Motion is truly cognizable. All efforts to understand its essential
nature do but bring us to alternative impossibilities of thought.




§18. On lifting a chair the force exerted we regard as equal to that
antagonistic force called the weight of the chair, and we cannot think of
these as equal without thinking of them as like in kind; since equality is
conceivable only between things that are connatural. Yet, contrariwise, it
is incredible that the force existing in the chair resembles the force present
to our minds. It scarcely needs to point out that since the force as known
to us is an affection of consciousness, we cannot conceive the force to exist
in the chair under the same form without endowing the chair with consciousness.
So that it is absurd to think of Force as in itself like our sensation of
it, and yet necessary so to think of it if we represent it in consciousness
at all.




How, again, can we understand the connexion between Force and Matter?
Matter is known to us only through its manifestations of Force: abstract
its resistance mediately or immediately offered and there remains nothing
but empty extension. Yet, on the other hand, resistance is equally unthinkable
apart from Matter -- apart from something extended. Not only are centres
of force devoid of extension unimaginable, but we cannot imagine either extended
or unextended centres of force to attract and repel other such centres at
a distance, without the intermediation of some kind of matter. The hypothesis
of Newton, equally with that of Boscovich, is open to the charge that it
supposes one thing to act on another through empty space -- a supposition
which cannot be represented in thought. This charge is indeed met by introducing
a hypothetical fluid existing among the atoms or centres. But the problem
is not thus solved: it is simply shifted, and reappears when the constitution
of this fluid is inquired into. How impossible it is to elude the difficulty
is best seen in the case of astronomical forces. The Sun gives us sensations
of light and heat; and we have ascertained that between the cause as existing
in the Sun, and the effect as experienced on the Earth, a lapse of eight
minutes occurs: whence unavoidably result in us the conceptions of both a
force and a motion. So that for assuming a luminiferous ether, there is the
defence, not only that the exercise of force through 92,000,000 of miles
of absolute vacuum is inconceivable, but also that it is impossible to conceive
motion in the absence of something moved. Similarly in the case of gravitation.
Newton described himself as unable to think that the attraction of one body
for another at a distance, could be exerted in the absence of an intervening
medium. But now let us ask how much the forwarder we are if an intervening
medium be assumed. This ether whose undulations according to the received
hypothesis constitute heat and light, and which is the vehicle of gravitation
-- how is it constituted? We must regard it in the way that physicists usually
regard it, as composed of atoms or molecules which attract and repel one
another: infinitesimal it may be in comparison with those of ordinary matter,
but still atoms or molecules. And remembering that this ether is imponderable,
we are obliged to conclude that the ratio between the interspaces of these
atoms and the atoms themselves is immense. Hence we have to conceive these
infinitesimal molecules acting on one another through relatively vast distances.
How is this conception easier than the other? We still have mentally. to
represent a body as acting where it is not, and in the absence of anything
by which its action may be transferred; and what matters it whether this
takes place on a large or a small scale? Thus we are obliged to conclude
that matter, whether ponderable or imponderable, and whether aggregated or
in its hypothetical units, acts on matter through absolutely vacant space;
and yet this conclusion is unthinkable.




Another difficulty of conception, converse in nature but equally insurmountable,
must be added. If, on the one hand, we cannot in thought see matter acting
upon matter through vacant space; on the other hand, it is incomprehensible
that the gravitation of one particle of matter towards another, and towards
all others, should be the same whether the intervening space is filled with
matter or not. I lift from the ground, and continue to hold, a pound weight.
Now, into the vacancy between it and the ground, is introduced a mass of
matter of any kind whatever, in any state whatever; and the gravitation of
the weight is entirely unaffected. Each individual of the infinity of particles
composing the Earth acts on the pound in absolutely the same way, whatever
intervenes, or if nothing intervenes. Through eight thousand miles of the
Earth's substance, each molecule at the antipodes affects each molecule of
the weight, in utter indifference to the fullness or emptiness of the space
between them. So that each portion of matter in its dealings with remote
portions, treats all intervening portions as though they did not exist; and
yet, at the same time, it recognizes their existence with scrupulous exactness
in its direct dealings with them.




While then it is impossible to form any idea of Force in itself, it is
equally impossible to comprehend its mode of exercise.




§19. Turning now from the outer to the inner world, let us contemplate,
not the agencies to which we ascribe our subjective modifications, but the
subjective modifications themselves. These constitute a series. Difficult
as we find it distinctly to individualize them, it is nevertheless beyond
question that our states of consciousness occur in succession.




Is this chain of states of consciousness infinite or finite? We cannot
say infinite; not only because we have indirectly reached the conclusion
that there was a period when it commenced, but also because all infinity
is inconceivable -- an infinite series included. If we say finite we say
it inferentially; for we have no direct knowledge of either of its ends.
Go back in memory as far as we may, we are wholly unable to identify our
first states of consciousness. Similarly at the other extreme. We infer a
termination to the series at a future time, but cannot directly know it;
and we cannot really lay hold of that temporary termination reached at the
present moment. For the state of consciousness recognized by us as our last,
is not truly our last. That any mental affection may be known as one of the
series, it must be remembered -- represented in thought, not presented. The
truly last state of consciousness is that which is passing in the very act
of contemplating a state just past -- that in which we are thinking of the
one before as the last. So that the proximate end of the change eludes us,
as well as the remote end.




"But," it may be said, "though we cannot directly know
consciousness to be finite in duration, because neither of its limits can
be actually reached, yet we can very well conceive it to be so." No:
not even this is true. We cannot conceive the terminations of that consciousness
which alone we really know -- our own -- any more than we can perceive its
terminations. For in truth the two acts are here one. In either case such
terminations must be, as above said, not presented in thought, but represented;
and they must be represented as in the act of occurring. Now to represent
the termination of consciousness as occurring in ourselves, is to think of
ourselves as contemplating the cessation of the last state of consciousness;
and this implies a supposed continuance of consciousness after its last state,
which is absurd.




Hence, while we are unable to believe or to conceive that the duration
of consciousness is infinite, we are equally unable either to know it as
finite, or to conceive it as finite: we can only infer from indirect evidence
that it is finite.




§20. Nor do we meet with any greater success when, instead of the
extent of consciousness, we consider its substance. The question -- What
is this that thinks? admits of no better solution than the question to which
we have just found none but inconceivable answers.




The existence of each individual as known to himself, has always been
held the most incontrovertible of truths. To say -- "I am as sure of
it as I am sure that I exist," is, in common speech, the most emphatic
expression of certainty. And this fact of personal existence, testified to
by the universal consciousness of men, has been made the basis of more philosophies
than one.




Belief in the reality of self cannot, indeed, be escaped while normal
consciousness continues. What shall we say of these successive impressions
and ideas which constitute consciousness? Are they affections of something
called mind, which, as being the subject of them, is the real ego? If we
say this we imply that the ego is an entity. Shall we assert that these impressions
and ideas are not the mere superficial changes wrought on some thinking substance,
but are themselves the very body of this substance -- are severally the modified
forms which it from moment to moment assumes? This hypothesis, equally with
the foregoing, implies that the conscious self exists as a permanent continuous
being; since modifications necessarily involve something modified. Shall
we then betake ourselves to the sceptic's position, and argue that our impressions
and ideas themselves are to us the only existences, and that the personality
said to underlie them is a fiction? We do not even thus escape; since this
proposition, verbally intelligible but really unthinkable, itself makes the
assumption which it professes to repudiate. For how can consciousness be
wholly resolved into impressions and ideas, when an impression of necessity
imples something impressed? Or again, how can the sceptic who has decomposed
his consciousness into impressions and ideas, explain the fact that he considers
them as his impressions and ideas? Or once more, if, as he must, he admits
that he has an impression of his personal existence, what warrant can he
show for rejecting this impression as unreal while he accepts all his other
impressions as real?




But now, unavoidable as is this belief, it is yet a belief admitting of
no justification by reason: nay, indeed, it is a belief which reason, when
pressed for a distinct answer, rejects. One of the most recent writers who
has touched on this question -- Mr. Mansel -- does, indeed, contend that
in the consciousness of self we have a piece of real knowledge. His position
is that "let system makers say what they will, the unsophisticated sense
of mankind refuses to acknowledge that mind is but a bundle of states of
consciousness, as matter is (possibly) a bundle of sensible qualities."
But this position does not seem a consistent one for a Kantist, who pays
but small respect to "the unsophisticated sense of mankind" when
it testifies to the objectivity of space. Moreover, it may readily be shown
that a cognition of self, properly so called, is negatived by those laws
of thought which he emphasizes. The fundamental condition to all consciousness,
insisted upon by Mr. Mansel in common with Sir William Hamilton and others,
is the antithesis of subject and object. On this "primitive dualism
of consciousness," "from which the explanations of philosophy must
take their start," Mr. Mansel founds his refutation of the German absolutists.
But now what is the corollary, 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 the existence
of which is to each a fact beyond all others the most certain, is yet a thing
which cannot be known at all, in the strict sense of the word.




§21. Ultimate Scientific Ideas, then, are all representative of realities
that cannot be comprehended. After no matter how great a progress in the
colligation of facts and the establishment of generalizations ever wider
and wider, the fundamental truth remains as much beyond reach as ever. The
explanation of that which is explicable, does but bring into greater clearness
the inexplicableness of that which remains behind. Alike in the external
and the internal worlds, the man of science sees himself in the midst of
perpetual changes of which he can discover neither the beginning nor the
end. If he allows himself to entertain the hypothesis that the Universe originally
existed in a diffused form, he finds it impossible to conceive how this came
to be so; and equally, if he speculates on the future, he can assign no limit
to the grand succession of phenomena ever unfolding themselves before him.
In like manner if he looks inward he perceives that both ends of the thread
of consciousness are beyond his grasp. Neither end can be represented in
thought. When, again, he turns from the succession of phenomena, external
or internal, to their intrinsic nature, he is just as much at fault. Supposing
him in every case able to resolve the appearances, properties, and movements
of things, into manifestations of Force in Space and Time; he still finds
that Force, Space, and Time pass all understanding. Similarly, though analysis
of mental actions may finally bring him down to sensations, as the original
materials out of which all thought is woven, yet he is little forwarder;
for he can give no account either of sensations themselves or of that which
is conscious of sensations. Objective and subjective things he thus ascertains
to be alike inscrutable in their substance and genesis. In all directions
his investigations eventually bring him face to face with an insoluble enigma;
and be ever more clearly perceives it to be an insoluble enigma. He learns
at once the greatness and the littleness of the human intellect -- its power
in dealing with all that comes within the range of experience, its impotence
in dealing with all that transcends experience. He, more than any other,
truly knows that in its ultimate nature nothing can be known.




Chapter 4




The Relativity of all Knowledge




§22. The same conclusion is thus arrived at from whichever point
we set out. Ultimate religious ideas and ultimate scientific ideas, alike
turn out to be merely symbols of the actual, not cognitions of it.




The conviction, so reached, that human intelligence is incapable of absolute
knowledge, is one that has been slowly gaining ground. Each new ontological
theory, propounded in lieu of previous ones shown to be untenable, has been
followed by a new criticism leading to a new scepticism. All possible conceptions
have been one by one tried and found wanting; and so the entire field of
speculation has been gradually exhausted without positive result: the only
result reached being the negative one above stated -- that the reality existing
behind all appearances is, and must ever be, unknown. To this conclusion
almost every thinker of note has subscribed. "With the exception,"
says Sir William Hamilton, "of a few late Absolutist theorizers in Germany,
this is, perhaps, the truth of all others most harmoniously re-echoed by
every philosopher of every school." And among these he names -- Protagoras,
Aristotle, St. Augustin, Boethius, Averroes, Albertus Magnus, Gerson, Leo
Hebraeus, Melancthon, Scaliger, Francis Piccolomini, Giordano Bruno, Campanella,
Bacon, Spinoza, Newton, Kant.




It remains to point out how this belief may be established rationally,
as well as empirically. Not only is it that, as in the earlier thinkers above
named, a vague perception of the inscrutableness of things in themselves
results from discovering the illusiveness of sense-impressions; and not only
is it that, as shown in the foregoing chapters, experiments evolve alternative
impossibilities of thought out of every fundamental conception; but it is
that the relativity of our knowledge may be proved analytically. The induction
drawn from general and special experiences, may be confirmed by a deduction
from the nature of our intelligence. Two ways of reaching such a deduction
exist. Proof that our cognitions are not, and never can be, absolute, is
obtainable by analyzing either the product or thought, or the process of
thought. Let us analyze each.




§23. If, when walking through the fields some day in September, you
hear a rustle a few yards in advance, and on observing the ditch-side where
it occurs, see the herbage agitated, you will probably turn towards the spot
to learn by what this sound and motion are produced. As you approach there
flutters into the ditch a partridge; on seeing which your curiosity is satisfied
-- you have what you call an explanation of the appearances. The explanation,
mark, amounts to this; that whereas throughout life you have had countless
experiences of disturbance among small stationary bodies, accompanying the
movement of other bodies among them, and have generalized the relation between
such disturbances and such movements, you consider this particular disturbance
explained, on finding it to present an instance of the like relation. Suppose
you catch the partridge; and, wishing to ascertain why it did not escape,
examine it, and find at one spot a trace of blood on its feathers. You now
understand, as you say, what has disabled the partridge. It has been wounded
by a sportsman -- adds another case to the cases already seen by you, of
birds being killed or injured by the shot discharged at them from fowling-pieces.
And in assimilating this case to other such cases, consists your understanding
of it. But now, on consideration, a difficulty suggests itself. Only a single
shot has struck the partridge, and that not in a vital place: the wings are
uninjured, as are also those muscles which move them; and the creature proves
by its struggles that it has abundant strength. Why then, you inquire of
yourself, does it not fly? Occasion favouring, you put the question to an
anatomist, who furnishes you with a solution. He points out that this solitary
shot has passed close to the place at which the nerve supplying the wing-muscles
of one side, diverges from the spine; and explains that a slight injury to
this nerve, extending even to the rupture of a few fibres, may by preventing
a perfect co-ordination in the actions of the two wings, destroy the power
of flight. You are no longer puzzled. But what has happened? -- what has
changed your state from one of perplexity to one of comprehension? Simply
the disclosure of a class of previously known cases, along with which you
can include this case. The connexion between lesions of the nervous system
and paralysis of limbs has been already many times brought under your notice;
and you here find a relation of cause and effect that is essentially similar.




Let us suppose you are led to ask the anatomist questions about some organic
actions which, remarkable though they are, you had not before cared to understand.
How is respiration effected? You ask -- why does air periodically rush into
the lungs? The answer is that influx of air is caused by an enlargement of
the thoracic cavity, due, partly to depression of the diaphragm, partly to
motion of the ribs. But how can these bony hoops move, and how does motion
of them enlarge the cavity? In reply the anatomist explains that though attached
by their ends the ribs can move a little round their points of attachment;
he then shows you that the plane of each pair of ribs makes an acute angle
with the spine; that this angle widens when the sternal ends of the ribs
are raised; and he makes you realize the consequent dilatation of the cavity,
by pointing out how the area of a parallelogram increases as its angles approach
to right angles: you understand this special fact when you see it to be an
instance of a general geometrical fact. There still arises, however, the
question -- why does the air rush into this enlarged cavity? To which comes
the answer that, when the thoracic cavity is enlarged, the contained air,
partially relieved from pressure, expands, and so loses some of its resisting
Power; that hence it opposes to the pressure of the external air a less pressure;
and that as air, like every other fluid, presses equally in all directions,
motion must result along any line in which the resistance is less than elsewhere;
whence follows an inward current. And this interpretation you recognize as
one, when a few facts of like kind, exhibited more plainly in a visible fluid
such as water, are cited in illustration. Again, after being shown that the
limbs are compound levers acting in essentially the same way as levers of
iron, you would consider yourself as having obtained a partial rationale
of animal movements. The contraction of a muscle, seeming before quite unaccountable,
would seem less unaccountable were you shown how, by a galvanic current,
a series of soft iron magnets could be made to shorten itself through the
attraction of each magnet for its neighbours: -- an alleged analogy which
especially answers the purpose of our argument, since, whether real or fancied,
it equally illustrates the mental illumination that results on finding a
class of cases within which a particular case may perhaps be included. Similarly
when you learn that animal heat arises from chemical combination, and so
may be classed with heat evolved in other chemical combinations -- when you
learn that the absorption of nutrient liquids through the coats of the intestines
is an instance of osmotic action -- when you learn that the changes undergone
by food during digestion, are like changes artificially producible in the
laboratory; you regard yourself as knowing something about the natures of
these phenomena.




Observe now what we have been doing. We began with special and concrete
facts. In explaining each, and afterwards explaining the general facts of
which they are instances, we have got down to certain highly general facts:
-- to a geometrical principle, to a simple law of mechanical action, to a
law of fluid equilibrium -- to truths in physics, in chemistry, in thermology.
The particular phenomena with which we set out have been merged in larger
and larger groups of phenomena; and as they have been so merged, we have
arrived at solutions we consider profound in proportion as this process has
been carried far. Still deeper explanations are simply further steps in the
same direction. When, for instance, it is asked why the law of action of
the lever is what it is, or why fluid equilibrium and fluid motion exhibit
the relations they do, the answer furnished by mathematicians consists in
the disclosure of the principle of virtual velocities -- a principle holding
true alike in fluids and solids -- a principle under which the others are
comprehended.




Is this process limited or unlimited? Can we go on for ever explaining
classes of facts by including them in larger classes; or must we eventually
come to a largest class? The supposition that the process is unlimited, were
any one absurd enough to espouse it, would still imply that an ultimate explanation
could not be reached, since infinite time would be required to reach it.
While the unavoidable conclusion that it is limited, equally implies that
the deepest fact cannot be understood. For if the successively deeper interpretations
of Nature which constitute advancing knowledge, are merely successive inclusions
of special truths in general truths, and of general truths in truths still
more general; it follows that the most general truth, not admitting of inclusion
in any other, does not admit of interpretation. Of necessity, therefore,
explanation must eventually bring us down to the inexplicable. Comprehension
must become something other than comprehension, before the ultimate fact
can be comprehended.




§24. The inference which is thus forced on us when we analyze the
product of thought, as exhibited objectively in scientific generalizations,
is equally forced on us by an analysis of the process of thought, as exhibited
subjectively in consciousness. The demonstration of the relative character
of our knowledge, as deduced from the nature of intelligence, has been brought
to its most definite shape by Sir William Hamilton. I cannot here do better
than extract from his essay on the "Philosophy of the Unconditioned,"
the passage containing the substance of his doctrine.




"The unconditionally unlimited, or the Infinite, the unconditionally
limited, or the Absolute, cannot positively be construed to the mind; they
can be conceived, only by a thinking away from, or abstraction of, those
very conditions under which thought itself is realized; consequently, the
notion of the Unconditioned is only negative, -- negative of the conceivable
itself. For example, on the one hand we can positively conceive, neither
an absolute whole, that is, a whole so great, that we cannot also conceive
it as a relative part of a still greater whole; nor an absolute part, that
is, a part so small, that we cannot also conceive it as a relative whole,
divisible into smaller parts. On the other hand, we cannot positively represent,
or realize, or construe to the mind (as here understanding and imagination
coincide), an infinite whole, for this could only be done by the infinite
synthesis in thought of finite wholes, which would itself require an infinite
time for its accomplishment; nor, for the same reason, can we follow out
in thought an infinite divisibility of parts. The result is the same, whether
we apply the process to limitation in space, in time, or in degree. * * *




"As the conditionally limited (which we may briefly call the conditioned)
is thus the only possible object of knowledge and of positive thought --
thought necessarily supposes conditions. To think is to condition; and conditional
limitation is the fundamental law of the possibility of thought. For, as
the greyhound cannot outstrip his shadow, nor (by a more appropriate simile)
the eagle outsoar the atmosphere in which he floats, and by which alone he
may be supported; so the mind cannot transcend that sphere of limitation,
within and through which exclusively the possibility of thought is realized.
* * * How, indeed, it could ever be doubted that thought is only of the conditioned,
may well be deemed a matter of the profoundest admiration. Thought cannot
transcend consciousness; consciousness is only possible under the antithesis
of a subject and object of thought, known only in correlation, and mutually
limiting each other; while, independently of this, all that we know either
of subject or object, either of mind or matter, is only a knowledge in each
of the particular, of the plural, of the different, of the modified, of the
phaenomenal. We admit that the consequence of this doctrine is, -- that philosophy,
if viewed as more than a science of the conditioned, is impossible. Departing
from the particular, we admit, that we can never, in our highest generalizations,
rise above the finite; that our knowledge, whether of mind or matter, can
be nothing more than a knowledge of the relative manifestations of an existence,
which in itself it is our highest wisdom to recognize aS beyond the reach
of philosophy. * * *




"We are thus taught the salutary lesson, that the capacity of thought
is not to be constituted into the measure of existence; and are warned from
recognizing the domain of our knowledge as necessarily co-extensive with
the horizon of our faith. And by a wonderful revelation, we are thus, in
the very consciousness of our inability to conceive aught above the relative
and finite, inspired with a belief in the existence of something unconditioned
beyond the sphere of all comprehensible reality."




Clear and conclusive as this statement of the case appears when carefully
studied, it is expressed in so abstract a manner as to be not very intelligible
to the general reader. A more popular presentation of it. with illustrative
applications, as given by Mr. Mansel in his Limits of Religious Thought,
will make it more fully understood. The following extracts, which I take
the liberty of making from his pages, will suffice.




"The very conception of consciousness in whatever mode it may be
manifested, necessarily implies distinction between one object and another.
To be conscious, we must be conscious of something; and that something can
only be known, as that which it is, by being distinguished from that which
it is not. But distinction is necessarily imitation; for, if one object is
to be distinguished from another, it must possess some form of existence
which the other has not, or it must not possess some form which the other
has. * * * If all thought is limitation; -- if whatever we conceive is, by
the very act of conception, regarded as finite, -- the infinite, from a human
point of view, is merely a name for the absence of those conditions under
which thought is possible. To speak of a Conception of the Infinite is, therefore,
at once to affirm those conditions and to deny them. The contradiction, which
we discover in such a conception, is only that which we have ourselves placed
there, by tacitly assuming the conceivability of the inconceivable. The condition
of consciousness is distinction; and condition of distinction is limitation.
We can have no consciousness of Being in general which is not some Being
in particular: a thing, in consciousness, is one thing out of many. In assuming
the possibility of an infinite object of consciousness, I assume, therefore,
that it is at the same time limited and unlimited; -- actually something,
without which it could not be an object of consciousness, and actually nothing,
without which it could not be infinite. * * *




"A second characteristic of Consciousness is, that it is only possible
in the form of a relation. There must be a Subject, or person conscious,
and an Object, or thing of which he is conscious. There can be no consciousness
without the union of these two factors; and, in that union, each exists only
as it is related to the other. The subject is a subject, only in so far as
it is conscious of an object; the object is an object, only in so far as
it is apprehended by a subject: and the destruction of either is the destruction
of consciousness itself. It is thus manifest that a consciousness of the
Absolute is equally self-contradictory with that of the Infinite. To be conscious
of the Absolute as such, we must know that an object, which is given in relation
to our consciousness, is identical with one which exists in its own nature,
out of all relation to consciousness. But to know this identity, we must
be able to compare the two together; and such a comparison is itself a contradiction.
We are in fact required to compare that of which we are conscious with that
of which we are not conscious; the comparison itself being an act of consciousness,
and only possible through the consciousness of both its objects. It is thus
manifest that, even if we could be conscious of the absolute we could not
possibly know that it is the absolute: and, as we can be conscious of an
object as such, only by knowing it to be what it is, this is equivalent to
an admission that we cannot be conscious of the absolute at all. As an object
of COnsciousness, every thing is necessarily relative; and what a thing may
be out of consciousness no mode of consciousness can tell us. * * *




"This contradiction, again, admits of the same explanation as the
former, * * * Existence, as we conceive it, is but a name for the several
ways in which objects are presented to our consciousness, -- a general term,
embracing a variety of relations. The Absolute, on the other hand, is a term
expressing no object of thought, but only a denial of the relation by which
thought is constituted."




Here let me point out how the same general inference may be evolved from
another fundamental condition to thought, omitted by Sir W. Hamilton and
not supplied by Mr. Mansel; -- a condition which, under its obverse aspect,
we have already contemplated in the last section. Every complete act of consciousness,
besides distinction and relation, also implies likeness. Before it can constitute
a piece of knowledge, or even become an idea, a mental state must be known
not only as separate in kind or quality from certain foregoing states to
which it is known as related by succession, but it must further be known
as of the same kind or quality with certain other foregoing states. That
organization of changes which constitutes thinking, involves continuous integration
as well as continuous differentiation. Were each new affection of the mind
perceived simply as an affection in some way contested with preceding ones
-- were there but a chain of impressions, each of which as it arose was merely
distinguished from its predecessors; consciousness would be a chaos. To produce
that orderly consciousness which we call intelligence, there requires the
assimilation of each impression to others that occurred earlier in the series.
Both the successive mental states, and the successive relations which they
bear to one another, must be classified; and classification involves not
only a parting of the unlike, but also a binding together of the like. In
brief, a true cognition is possible only through an accompanying recognition.
Should it be objected that if so there cannot be a first cognition, and hence
there can be no cognition, the reply is that cognition proper arises gradually
-- that during the first stage of incipient intelligence, before the feelings
produced by intercourse with the outer world have been put into order, there
are no cognitions; and that, as every infant shows us, these slowly emerge
out of the confusion of unfolding consciousness as fast as the experiences
are arranged into groups -- as fast as the most frequently repeated sensations,
and their relations to one another, become familiar enough to admit of their
recognition as such or such, whenever they recur. Should it be further objected
that if cognition presupposes recognition, there can be no cognition, even
by an adult, of an object never before seen; there is still the sufficient
answer that in so far as it is not assimilated to previously-seen objects
it is not known, and that it is known only in so far as it is assimilated
to them. Of this paradox the interpretation is, that an object is classifiable
in various ways with various degress of completeness. An animal hitherto
unknown (mark the word), though not referable to any established species
or genus, is yet recognized as belonging to one of the larger divisions-mammals,
birds, reptiles, or fishes; or should it be so anomalous that its alliance
with any of these is not determinable, it may yet be classed as vertebrate
or invertebrate; or if it be one of those organisms in which it is doubtful
whether the animal or vegetal traits predominate, it is still known as a
living body. Even should it be questioned whether it is organic, it remains
beyond question that it is a material object, and it is cognized by being
recognized as such. Whence it is clear that a thing is perfectly known only
when it is in all respects like certain things previously observed. that
in proportion to the number of respects in which it is unlike them, is the
extent to which it is unknown; and that hence when it has absolutely no attribute
in common with anything else, it must be absolutely beyond the bound of knowledge.




Observe the corollary which here concerns us. A cognition of the Real,
as distinguished from the Phenomenal, must, if it exists, conform to this
law of cognition in general. The First Cause, the Infinite, the Absolute,
to be known at all, must be classed. To be positively thought of, it must
be thought of as such or such -- as of this or that kind. Can it be like
in kind to anything of which we have experience? Obviously not. Between the
creating and the created, there must be a distinction transcending any of
the distinctions between different divisions of the created. That which is
UnCauSed cannot be assimilated to that which is caused: the two being, in
the very naming, antithetically opposed. The Infinite cannot be grouped along
with something finite; since, in being so grouped, it must be regarded as
not infinite. It is impossible to put the Absolute in the same category with
anything relative, so long as the Absolute is defined as that of which no
necessary relation can be predicated. Is it then that the Actual, though
unthinkable by classification with the Apparent, is thinkable by classification
with itself? This supposition is equally absurd with the other. It implies
the plurality of the First Cause, the Infinite, the Absolute; and this implication
is self-contradictory. There cannot be more than one First Cause; seeing
that the existence of more than one would involve the existence of something
necessitating more than one, which something would be the true First Cause.
How self-destructive is the assumption of two or more Infinites, is manifest
on remembering that such Infinites, by limiting each other, would become
finite. And similarly, an Absolute which existed not alone but along with
other Absolutes, would no longer be an absolute but a relative. The Unconditioned
therefore, as classable neither with any form of the conditioned nor with
any other Unconditioned, cannot be classed at all. And to admit that it cannot
be known as of such or such kind, is to admit that it is unknowable.




Thus, from the very nature of thought, the relativity of our knowledge
is inferable in three ways. As we find by analyzing it, and as we see it
objectively displayed in every proposition, a thought involves relation,
difference, likeness. Whatever does not present each of these does not admit
of cognition. And hence we may say that the Unconditioned, as presenting
none of them, is trebly unthinkable.




§25. From yet another point of view we may discern the same great
truth. If, instead of examining our intellectual powers directly as displayed
in the act of thought, or indirectly as displayed in thought when expressed
by words, we look at the connexion between the mind and the world, a like
conclusion is forced on us. The very definition of Life, phenomenally considered,
when reduced to its most abstract shape, discloses this ultimate implication.




All vital actions, considered not separately but in their ensemble, have
for their final purpose the balancing of certain outer processes by certain
inner processes. There are external forces having a tendency to bring the
matter of which living bodies consist, into that stable equilibrium shown
by inorganic bodies; there are internal forces by which this tendency is
constantly antagonized; and the unceasing changes which constitute Life,
may be regarded as incidental to the maintenance of the antagonism. For instance,
to preserve the erect posture certain weights have to be neutralized by certain
strains: each limb or other organ, gravitating to the Earth and pulling down
the parts to which it is attached, has to be preserved in position by the
tension of sundry muscles; or, in other words, the forces which would if
allowed bring the body to the ground, have to be counterbalanced by other
forces. Again, to keep up the temperature at a particular point, the external
process of radiation and absorption of heat by the surrounding medium, must
be met by a corresponding internal process of chemical combination, whereby
more heat may be evolved; to which add that if from atmospheric changes the
loss becomes greater or less, the production must become greater or less.
Similarly throughout the organic actions at large.




In the lower kinds of life the adjustments thus maintained are direct
and simple; as in a plant, the vitality of which mainly consists in osmotic
and chemical actions responding to the co-existence of light, heat, water,
and carbon-dioxide around it. But in animals, and especially in the higher
orders of them, the adjustments become extremely complex. Materials for growth
and repair not being, like those which plants require, everywhere present,
but being widely dispersed and under special forms, have to be found, to
be secured, and to be reduced to a fit state for assimilation. Hence the
need for locomotion; hence the need for the senses; hence the need for prehensile
and destructive appliances; hence the need for an elaborate digestive apparatus.
Observe, however, that these complications are nothing but aids to the maintenance
of the organic balance, in opposition to those physical, chemical, and other
agencies which tend to overturn it. And observe, further, that while these
complications aid this fundamental adaptation of inner to outer actions,
they are themselves nothing but additional adaptations of inner to outer
actions. For what are those movements by which a predatory creature pursues
its prey, or by which its prey seeks to escape, but certain changes in the
organism fitted to meet certain changes in its environment? What is that
operation which constitutes the perception of a piece of food, but a particular
correlation of nervous modifications, answering to a particular correlation
of physical properties? What is that process by which food when swallowed
is made fit for assimilation, but a set of mechanical and chemical actions
responding to the mechanical and chemical characters of the food? Hence,
while Life in its simplest form is the correspondence of certain inner physico-chemical
actions with certain outer physico-chemical actions, each advance to a higher
form of Life consists in a better preservation of this primary correspondence
by the establishment of other correspondences.




So that, passing over its noumenal nature of which we know nothing, Life
is definable as the continuous adjustment of internal relations to external
relations. And when we so define it, we discover that the physical and the
psychical life are equally comprehended by the definition. This which we
call Intelligence, arises when the external relations to which the internal
ones are adjusted become numerous, complex, and remote in time or space.
Every advance in Intelligence essentially consists in the establishment of
more varied, more complete, or more involved adjustments. And even the highest
generalizations of science consist of mental relations of co-existence and
sequence, so co-ordinated as exactly to tally with certain relations of co-existence
and sequence that occur externally. A caterpillar, finding its way on to
a plant having a certain odour, begins to eat -- has inside of it an organic
relation between a particular impression and a particular set of actions,
answering to the relation outside of it between scent and nutriment. The
sparrow, guided by the more complex correlation of impressions which the
colour form, and movements of the caterpillar gave it, and guided by other
correlations which measure the position and distance of the caterpillar,
adjusts certain correlated muscular movements so as to seize the caterpillar.
through a much greater distance is the hawk, hovering above, affected by
the relations of shape and motion which the sparrow presents; and the much
more complicated and prolonged series of related nervous and muscular changes,
gone through in correspondence with the sparrow's changing relations of position,
finally succeed when they are precisely adjusted to these changing relations.
In the fowler, experience has established a relation between the appearance
and flight of a hawk and the destruction of other birds, including game.
There is also in him an established relation between those visual impressions
answering to a certain distance in space, and the range of his gun. And he
has learned, too, what relations of position the sights must bear to a point
somewhat in advance of the flying bird, before he can fire with success.
Similarly if we go back to the manufacture of the gun. By relations of co-existence
between colour, density, and place in the earth, a particular mineral is
known as one which yields iron; and the obtainment of iron from it, results
when certain correlated acts of ours are adjusted to certain correlated affinities
displayed by ironstone, coal, and lime, at a high temperature. If we descend
yet a step further, and ask a chemist to explain the explosion of gunpowder,
or apply to a mathematician for a theory of projectiles, we still find that
special or general relations of co-existence and sequence among properties,
motions, spaces, etc., are all they can teach us. And lastly, let it be noted
that what we call truth guiding us to successful action and consequent maintenance
of life, is simply the accurate correspondence of subjective to objective
relations; while error, leading to failure and therefore towards death, is
the absence of such accurate correspondence.




If, then, Life, as knowable by us, inclusive of Intelligence in its highest
forms, consists in the continuous adjustment of internal relations to external
relations, the relative character of our knowledge is necessarily implied.
The simplest cognition being the establishment of some connexion between
subjective states, answering to some connexion between objective agencies;
and each successively more complex cognition being the establishment of some
more involved connexion of such states, answering to some more involved connexion
of such agencies; it is clear that the process, no matter how far it be carried,
can never bring within the reach of Intelligence, either the states themselves
or the agencies themselves. Ascertaining which things occur along with which,
and what things follow what, supposing it to be pursued exhaustively must
still leave us with co-existences and sequences only. If every act of knowing
is the formation of a relation in consciousness answering to a relation in
the environment, then the relativity of knowledge is self-evident -- becomes
indeed a truism. Thinking being relationing, no thought can ever express
more than relations.




And here let us note how that to which our intelligence is confined, is
that with which alone our intelligence is concerned. The knowledge within
our reach is the only knowledge that can be of service to us. This maintenance
of a correspondence between internal actions and external act ions, merely
requires that the agencies acting upon us shall be known in their co-existences
and sequences, and not that they shall be known in themselves. If x and y
are two uniformly connected properties in some outer object, while a and
b are the effects they produce in our consciousness, then the sole need is
that a and b and the relation between them, shall always answer to x and
y and the relation between them. It matters nothing to us if a and b are
like x and y or not. Could they be identical with them, we should not be
one whit the better off; and their total dissimilarity is no disadvantage.




Deep down then in the very nature of Life, the relativity of our knowledge
is discernible. The analysis of vital actions in general, leads not only
to the conclusion that things in themselves cannot be known to us, but also
to the conclusion that knowledge of them, were it possible, would be useless.




§26. There remains the final question -- What must we say concerning
that which transcends knowledge? Are we to rest wholly in the consciousness
of phenomena? Is the result of inquiry to exclude utterly from our minds
everything but the relative? or must we also believe in something beyond
the relative?




The answer of pure logic is held to be that by the limits of our intelligence
we are rigorously confined within the relative, and that anything transcending
the relative can be thought of as a pure negation, or as a non-existence.
"The absolute is conceived merely by a negation of conceivability"
writes Sir William Hamilton. "The Absolute and the Infinite," says
Mr. Mansel, "are thus, like the Inconceivable and the Imperceptible,
names indicating, not an object of thought or of consciousness at all, but
the mere absence of the conditions under which consciousness is possible."
So that since reason cannot warrant us in affirming the positive existence
of that which is cognizable only as a negation, we cannot rationally affirm
the positive existence of anything beyond phenomena.




Unavoidable as this conclusion seems, it involves, I think, a grave error.
If the premiss be granted the inference must be admitted; but the premiss,
in the form presented by Sir William Hamilton and Mr. Mansel, is not strictly
true. Though, in the foregoing pages, the arguments used by these writers
to show that the Absolute is unknowable, have been approvingly quoted; and
though these arguments have been enforced by others equally thoroughgoing;
yet there remains to be stated a qualification which saves us from the scepticism
otherwise necessitated. It is not to be denied that so long as we confine
ourselves to the purely logical aspect of the question, the propositions
quoted above must be accepted in their entirety; but when we contemplate
its more general, or psychological, aspect, we find that these propositions
are imperfect statements of the truth: omitting, or rather excluding, as
they do, an all-important fact. To speak specifically: -- Besides that definite
consciousness of which Logic formulates the laws, there is also an indefinite
consciousness which cannot be formulated. Besides complete thoughts, and
besides the thoughts which though incomplete admit of completion, there are
thoughts which it is impossible to complete; and yet which are still real,
in the sense that they are normal affections of the intellect.




Observe, in the first place, that every one of the arguments by which
the relativity of our knowledge is demonstrated, distinctly postulates the
positive existence of something beyond the relative. To say that we cannot
know the Absolute, is, by implication, to affirm that there is an Absolute.
In the very denial of our power to learn what the Absolute is, there lies
hidden the assumption that it is; and the making of this assumption proves
that the Absolute has been present to the mind, not as a nothing but as a
something. Similarly with every step in the reasoning by which this doctrine
is upheld. The Noumenon, everywhere named as the antithesis to the Phenomenon,
is necessarily thought of as an actuality. It is impossible to conceive that
our knowledge is a knowledge of Appearances only without at the same time
assuming a Reality of which they are appearances; for appearance without
reality is unthinkable. Strike out from the argument the terms Unconditioned,
Infinite, Absolute, and in place of them write, "negation of conceivability,"
or "absence of the conditions under which consciousness is possible,"
and the argument becomes nonsense. To realize in thought any one of the propositions
of which the argument consists, the Unconditioned must be represented as
positive and not negative. How then can it be a legitimate conclusion from
the argument, that our consciousness of it is negative? An argument the very
construction of which assigns to a certain term a certain meaning, but which
ends in showing that this term has no such meaning, is simply an elaborate
suicide. Clearly, then, the very demonstration that a definite consciousness
of the Absolute is impossible to us, unavoidably presupposes an indefinite
consciousness of it.




Perhaps the best way of showing that we are obliged to form a positive
though Vague consciousness of this which transcends distinct consciousness,
is to analyze our conception of the antithesis between Relative and Absolute.
It is a doctrine called in question by none, that such antinomies of thought
as Whole and Part, Equal and Unequal, Singular and Plural, are necessarily
conceived as correlatives: the conception of a part is impossible without
the conception of a whole; there can be no idea of equality without one of
inequality. And it is undeniable that in the same manner, the Relative is
itself conceivable as such, only by opposition to the Irrelative or Absolute.
Sir William Hamilton, however, in his trenchant (and in most parts unanswerable)
criticism on Cousin, contends, in conformity with his position above stated,
that one of these correlatives is nothing more than the negation of the other.
"Correlatives,' he says, "certainly suggest each other, but correlatives
may, or may not, be equally real and positive. In thought contradictories
necessarily imply each other, for the knowledge of contradictories is one.
But the reality of one contradictory, so far from guaranteeing the reality
of the other, is nothing else than its negation. Thus every positive notion
(the concept of a thing by what it is) suggests a negative notion (the concept
of a thing by what it is not); and the highest positive notion, the notion
of the conceivable, is not without its corresponding negative in the notion
of the inconceivable. But though these mutually suggest each other, the positive
alone is real; the negative is only an abstraction of the other, and in the
highest generality, even an abstraction of thought itself." Now the
assertion that of such contradictories "the negative is only an abstraction
of the other" -- "is nothing else than its negation," -- is
not true. In such correlatives as Equal and Unequal, it is obvious enough
that the negative concept contains something besides the negation of the
positive one; for the things of which equality is denied are not abolished
from consciousness by the denial. And the fact overlooked by Sir William
Hamilton is, that the like holds even with those correlatives of which the
negative is inconceivable, in the strict sense of the word. Take for example
the Limited and the Unlimited. Our notion of the Limited is composed, firstly
of a consciousness of some kind of being, and secondly of a consciousness
of the limits under which it is known. In the antithetical notion of the
Unlimited, the consciousness of limits is abolished, but not the consciousness
of some kind of being. It is quite true that in the absence of conceived
limits, this consciousness ceases to be a concept properly so called; but
it is none the less true that it remains as a mode of consciousness. If,
in such cases, the negative contradictory were, as alleged, "nothing
else" than the negation of the other, and therefore a mere non-entity
then it would follow that negative contradictories could be used interchangeably:
the Unlimited might be thought of as antithetical to the Divisible; and the
Indivisible as antithetical to the Limited. While the fact that they cannot
be so used, proves that in consciousness the Unlimited and the Indivisible
are qualitatively distinct, and therefore positive or real; since distinction
cannot exist between nothings. The error, (naturally fallen into by philosophers
intent on demonstrating the limits and conditions of consciousness,) consists
in assuming that consciousness contains nothing but limits and conditions;
to the entire neglect of that which is limited and conditioned. It is forgotten
that there is something which alike forms the raw material of definite thought
and remains after the definiteness which thinking gave it has been destroyed.
Now all this applies by change of terms to the last and highest of these
antinomies -- that between the Relative and the Non-relative. We are conscious
of the Relative as existence under conditions and limits. It is impossible
that these conditions and limits can be thought of apart from something to
which they give the form. The abstraction of these conditions and limits
is, by the hypothesis, the abstraction of them only. Consequently there must
be a residuary consciousness of something which filled up their outlines.
And this indefinite something constitutes our consciousness of the Non-relative
or Absolute. Impossible though it is to give to this consciousness any qualitative
or quantitative expression whatever, it is not the less certain that it remains
with us as a positive and indestructible element of thought.




More manifest still will this truth become when it is observed that our
conception of the Relative itself disappears' if our consciousness of the
Absolute is a pure negation. It is admitted, or rather it is contended, by
the writers I have quoted above, that contradictories can be known only in
relation to each other -- that equality, for instance, is unthinkable apart
from Inequality; and that thus the Relative can itself be conceived only
by opposition to the Non-relative. It is also admitted, or rather contended,
that the consciousness of a relation implies a consciousness of both the
related terms. If we are required to conceive the relation between the Relative
and Non-relative without being conscious of both, "we are in fact"
(to quote the words of Mr. Mansel differently applied) "required to
compare that of which we are conscious with that of which we are not conscious;
the comparison itself being an act of consciousness, and only possible through
the consciousness of both its objects." What then becomes of the assertion
that "the Absolute is conceived merely by a negation of conceivability,"
or as "the mere absence of the conditions under which consciousness
is possible?" If the Non-relative or Absolute, is present in thought
only as a mere negation, then the relation between it and the Relative becomes
unthinkable, because one of the terms of the relation is absent from consciousness.
And if this relation is unthinkable, then is the Relative itself unthinkable,
for want of its antithesis: whence results the disappearance of all thought
whatever.




Both Sir William Hamilton and Mr. Mansel do, in other places, distinctly
imply that our consciousness of the Absolute, indefinite though it is, is
positive. The very passage in which Sir William Hamilton asserts that "the
absolute is conceived merely by a negation of conceivability," itself
ends with the remark that, "by a wonderful revelation we are thus, in
the very consciousness of our inability to conceive aught above the relative
and finite, inspired with a belief in the existence of something unconditioned
beyond the sphere of all comprehensible reality." The last of these
assertions practically admits that which the first denies. By the laws of
thought as Sir William Hamilton interprets them, he finds himself forced
to the conclusion that our consciousness of the Absolute is a pure negation.
He nevertheless finds that there does exist in consciousness an irresistible
conviction of the real "existence of something unconditioned."
And he gets over the inconsistency by speaking of this conviction as "a
wonderful revelation," "a belief" with which we are "inspired:"
thus apparently hinting that it is supernaturally at variance with the laws
of thought. Mr. Mansel is betrayed into a like inconsistency. When he says
that "we are compelled, by the constitution of our minds, to believe
in the existence of an Absolute and Infinite Being, -- a belief which appears
forced upon us, as the complement of our consciousness of the relative and
the finite;" he clearly says by implication that this consciousness
is positive, and not negative. He tacitly admits that we are obliged to regard
the Absolute as something more than a negation -- that our consciousness
of it is not "the mere absence of the conditions under which consciousness
is possible."




The supreme importance of this question must be my apology for taxing
the reader's attention a little further, in the hope of clearing up the remaining
difficulties. The necessarily positive character of our consciousness of
the Unconditioned, which, as we have seen, follows from an ultimate law of
thought, will be better understood on contemplating the process of thought.




One of the arguments used to prove the relativity of our knowledge, is,
that we cannot conceive Space or Time as either limited or unlimited. It
is pointed out that when we imagine a limit, there simultaneously arises
the consciousness of a space or time beyond the limit. This remoter space
or time, though not contemplated as definite, is yet contemplated as real.
Though we do not form of it a conception proper, since we do not bring it
within bounds, there is yet in our minds the unshaped material of a conception.
Similarly with our consciousness of Cause. We are no more able to form a
circumscribed idea of Cause, than of Space or Time; and we are consequently
obliged to think of the Cause which transcends the limits of our thought
as positive though indefinite. As on conceiving any bounded space, there
arises a nascent consciousness of space outside the bounds; so, when we think
of any definite cause, there arises a nascent consciousness of a cause behind
it; and in the one case as in the other, this nascent consciousness is in
substance like that which suggests it, though without form. The momentum
of thought carries us beyond conditioned existence to unconditioned existence;
and this ever persists in us as the body of a thought to which we can give
no shape.




Hence our firm belief in objective reality. When we are taught that a
piece of matter, regarded by us as existing externally, cannot be really
known, but that we can know only certain impressions produced on us, we are
yet, by the relativity of thought, compelled to think of these in relation
to a cause -- the notion of a real existence which generated these impressions
becomes nascent. If it be proved that every notion of a real existence which
we can frame, is inconsistent with itself -- that matter, however conceived
by us, cannot be matter as it actually is, our conception, though transfigured,
is not destroyed: there remains the sense of reality, dissociated as far
as possible from those special forms under which it was before represented
in thought. Though Philosophy condemns successively each attempted conception
of the Absolute -- though in obedience to it we negative, one after another;
each idea as it arises; yet, as we cannot expel the entire contents of consciousness,
there ever remains behind an element which passes into new shapes. The continual
negation of each particular form and limit, simply results in the more or
less complete abstraction of all forms and limits; and so ends in an indefinite
consciousness of the unformed and unlimited.




And here we come face to face with the ultimate difficulty -- How can
there be constituted a consciousness of the unformed and unlimited, when,
by its very nature, consciousness is possible only under forms and limits?
Though not directly withdrawn by the withdrawal of its conditions, must not
the raw material of consciousness be withdrawn by implication? Must it not
vanish when the conditions of its existence vanish? That there must be a
solution of this difficulty is manifest; since even those who would put it
do, as already shown, admit that we have some such consciousness; and the
solution appears to be that above shadowed forth. Such consciousness is not,
and cannot be, constituted by any single act, but is the product of many
mental acts. In each concept there is an element which persists. It is impossible
for this element to be absent from consciousness, or for it to be present
in consciousness alone. Either alternative involves unconsciousness -- the
one from want of the substance; the other from want of the form. But the
persistence of this element under successive conditions, necessitates a sense
of it as distinguished from the conditions, and independent of them. The
sense of a something that is conditioned in every thought cannot be got rid
of, because the something cannot be got rid of. How then must the sense of
this something be constituted? Evidently by combining successive concepts
deprived of their limits and conditions. We form this indefinite thought,
as we form many of our definite thoughts, by the coalescence of a series
of thoughts. Let me illustrate this. A large complex object, having attributes
too numerous to be represented at once, is yet tolerably well conceived by
the union of several representations, each standing for part of its attributes.
On thinking of a piano, there first rises in imagination its outer appearance,
to which are instantly added (though by separate mental acts) the ideas of
its remote side and of its solid substance. A complete conception, however,
involves the strings, the hammers, the dampers, the pedals; and while successively
adding these, the attributes first thought of lapse partially or wholly out
of consciousness. Nevertheless, the whole group constitutes a representation
of the piano. Now as in this case we form a definite concept of a special
existence, by imposing limits and conditions in successive acts; so, in the
converse case, by taking away limits and conditions in successive acts, we
form an indefinite notion of general existence. By fusing a series of states
of consciousness, from each of which, as it arises, the limitations and conditions
are abolished, there is produced a consciousness of something unconditioned.
To speak more rigorously: -- this consciousness is not the abstract of any
one group of thoughts, ideas, or conceptions; but it is the abstract of all
thoughts, ideas, or conceptions. That which is common to them all we predicate
by the word existence. Dissociated as this becomes from each of its modes
by the perpetual change of those modes, it remains as an indefinite consciousness
of something constant under all modes -- of being apart from its appearances.
The distinction we feel between specialized existences and general existence,
is the distinction between that which is changeable in us and that which
is unchangeable. The contrast between the Absolute and the Relative in our
minds, is really the contrast between that mental element which exists absolutely,
and those which exist relatively.




So that this ultimate mental element is at once necessarily indefinite
and necessarily indestructible. Our consciousness of the unconditioned being
literally the unconditioned consciousness, or raw material of thought to
which in thinking we give definite forms, it follows that an ever-present
sense of real existence is the basis of our intelligence. As we can in successive
mental acts get rid of all particular conditions and replace them by others,
but cannot get rid of that undifferentiated substance of consciousness which
is conditioned anew in every thought, there ever remains with us a sense
of that which exists persistently and independently of conditions. While
by the laws of thought we are prevented from forming a conception of absolute
existence; we are by the laws of thought prevented from excluding the consciousness
of absolute existence: this consciousness being, as we here see, the obverse
of self-consciousness. And since the measure of relative validity among our
beliefs, is the degree of their persistence in opposition to the efforts
made to change them, it follows that this which persists at all times, under
all circumstances, has the highest validity of any.




The points in this somewhat too elaborate argument are these: In the very
assertion that all knowledge, properly so called, is Relative, there is involved
the assertion that there exists a Non-relative. In each step of the argument
by which this doctrine is established, the same assumption is made. From
the necessity of thinking in relations, it follows that the Relative is itself
inconceivable, except as related to a real Non-relative. Unless a real Non-relative
or Absolute be postulated, the Relative itself becomes absolute, and so brings
the argument to a contradiction. And on watching our thoughts we have seen
how impossible it is to get rid of the consciousness of an Actuality lying
behind Appearances; and how from this impossibility, results our indestructible
belief in that Actuality.




Chapter 5




The Reconcilation




§27. Thus do all lines of argument converge to the same conclusion.
Those imbecilities of the understanding which disclose themselves when we
try to answer the highest questions of objective science, subjective science
proves to be necessitated by the laws of that understanding. Finally we discover
that this conclusion which, in its unqualified form, seems opposed to the
instinctive convictions of mankind, falls into harmony with them when the
missing qualification is supplied. Here, then, is that basis of agreement
we set out to seek. This conclusion which objective science illustrates and
subjective science shows to be unavoidable, -- this conclusion which brings
the results of speculation into harmony with those of common sense; is also
the conclusion which reconciles Religion with Science. Common Sense asserts
the existence of a reality; Objective Science proves that this reality cannot
be what we think it; Subjective Science shows why we cannot think of it as
it is, and yet are compelled to think of it as existing; and in this assertion
of a Reality utterly inscrutable in nature, Religion finds an assertion essentially
coinciding with her own. We are obliged to regard every phenomenon as a manifestation
of some Power by which we are acted upon; though omnipresence is unthinkable,
yet, as experience discloses no bounds to the diffusion of phenomena, we
are unable to think of limits to the presence of this Power; while the criticisms
of Science teach us that this Power is Incomprehensible. And this consciousness
of an Incomprehensible Power, called omnipresent from inability to assign
its limits, is just that consciousness on which Religion dwells.




To understand fully how real is the reconciliation thus reached, it will
be needful to look at the respective attitudes that Religion and Science
have all along maintained towards this conclusion.




§28. In its earliest and crudest forms Religion manifested, however
vaguely and inconsistently, an intuition forming the germ of this highest
belief in which philosophies finally unite. The consciousness of a mystery
is traceable in the rudest ghost-theory. Each higher creed, rejecting those
definite and simple interpretations of Nature previously given, has become
more religious by doing this. As the concrete and conceivable agencies assigned
as the causes of things, have been replaced by agencies less concrete and
conceivable, the element of mystery has necessary become more predominant.
Through all its phases the disappearance of those dogmas by which the mystery
was made unmysterious, has formed the essential change delineated in religious
history. And so Religion has been approaching towards that complete recognition
of this mystery which is its goal.




For its essentially valid belief Religion has constantly done battle.
Gross as were the disguises under which it first espoused this belief, and
cherishing this belief, even still, under disfiguring vestments, it has never
ceased to maintain and defend it. Though from age to age Science has continually
defeated it wherever they have come in collision, and has obliged it to relinquish
one or more of its positions, it has held the remaining ones with undiminished
tenacity. After criticism has abolished its arguments, there has still remained
with it the indestructible consciousness of a truth which, however faulty
the mode in which it had been expressed, is yet a truth beyond cavil.




But while from the beginning, Religion has had the all-essential office
of preventing men from being wholly absorbed in the relative or immediate,
and of awakening them to a consciousness of something beyond it, this office
has been but very imperfectly discharged. In its early stages the consciousness
of supernature being simply the consciousness of numerous supernatural persons
essentially man-like, was not far removed from the ordinary consciousness.
As thus constituted, Religion was and has ever been more or less irreligious;
and indeed continues to be largely irreligious even now. In the first place
(restricting ourselves to Religion in its more developed form), it has all
along professed to have some knowledge of that which transcends knowledge,
and has so contradicted its own teachings. While with one breath it has asserted
that the Cause of all things passes understanding, it has, with the next
breath, asserted that the Cause of all things possesses such or such attributes
-- can be in so far understood. In the second place, while in great part
sincere in its fealty to the great truth it has had to uphold, it has often
been insincere, and consequently irreligious, in maintaining the untenable
doctrines by which it has obscured this great truth. Each assertion respecting
the nature, acts, or motives of that Power which the Universe manifests to
us, has been repeatedly called in question, and proved to be inconsistent
with itself, or with accompanying assertions. Yet each of them has been age
after age insisted on. Just as though unaware that its central position was
impregnable, Religion has obstinately held every outpost long after it was
obviously indefensible. And this introduces us to the third and most serious
form of irreligion which Religion has displayed; namely, an imperfect belief
in that which it especially professes to believe. How truly its central position
is impregnable, Religion has never adequately realized. In the devoutest
faith as we commonly see it, there lies hidden a core of scepticism; and
it is this scepticism which causes that dread of inquiry shown by Religion
when face to face with Science. Obliged to abandon one by one the superstitions
it once tenaciously held, and daily finding other cherished beliefs more
and more shaken, Religion secretly fears that all things may some day be
explained; and thus itself betrays a lurking doubt whether that Incomprehensible
Cause of which it is conscious, is really incomprehensible.




Of Religion then, we must always remember, that amid its many errors and
corruptions it has asserted and diffused a supreme verity. From the first,
the recognition of this supreme verity, in however imperfect a manner, has
been its vital element; and its chief defects, once extreme but gradually
diminishing, have been its failures to recognize in full that which it recognized
in part. The truly religious element of Religion has always been good; that
which has proved untenable in doctrine and vicious in practice, has been
its irreligious element; and from this it has been undergoing purification.




§29. And now observe that the agent which has effected the purification
has been Science. On both sides this fact is overlooked. Religion ignores
its immense debt to Science; and Science is scarcely at all conscious how
much Religion owes it. Yet it is demonstrable that every step by which Religion
has progressed from its first low conception to the comparatively high one
now reached, Science has helped it, or rather forced it, to take; and that
even now, Science is urging further steps in the same direction.




When we include under the name Science all definite knowledge of the order
existing among phenomena, it becomes manifest that from the outset, the discovery
of an established order has modified that conception of disorder or undetermined
order, which underlies every superstition. As fast as experience proves that
certain familiar changes always present the same sequences, there begins
to fade from the mind the conception of special personalities to whose variable
wills they were before ascribed. And when, step by step, accumulating observations
do the like with the less familiar changes, a similar modification of belief
takes place respecting them.




While this process seems to those who effect it, and those who undergo
it, an anti-religious one, it is really the reverse. Instead of the specific
comprehensible agency before assigned, there is substituted a less specific
and less comprehensible agency; and though this, standing in opposition to
the previous one, cannot at first call forth the same feeling, yet, as being
less comprehensible, it must eventually call forth this feeling more fully.
Take an instance. Of old the Sun was regarded as the chariot of a god, drawn
by horses. How far the idea thus grossly expressed was idealized, we need
not inquire. It suffices to remark that this accounting for the apparent
motion of the Sun by an agency like certain visible terrestrial agencies,
reduced a daily wonder to the level of the commonest intellect. When, many
centuries after, Copernicus having enunciated the heliocentric theory of
the solar system, Kepler discovered that the orbits of the planets are ellipses,
and that the planets describe equal areas in equal times, he concluded that
in each of them there must exist a spirit to guide its movements. Here we
see that with the progress of Science, there had disappeared the idea of
a gross mechanical traction, such as was first assigned in the case of the
Sun; but that while for the celestial motions there was substituted a less-easily
conceivable force, it was still thought needful to assume personal agents
as causes of the regular irregularity of the motions. When, finally it was
proved that these planetary revolutions with all their variations and disturbances,
conform to one universal law -- when the presiding spirits which Kepler conceived
were set aside, and the force of gravitation put in their places; the change
was really the abolition of an imaginable agency, and the substitution of
an unimaginable one. For though the law of gravitation is within our mental
grasp, it is impossible to realize in thought the force of gravitation. Newton
himself confessed the force of gravitation to be incomprehensible without
the intermediation of an ether; and, as we have already seen, (§18),
the assumption of an ether does not help us. Thus it is with Science in general.
Its progress in grouping particular relations of phenomena under laws, and
these special laws under laws more and more general, is of necessity a progress
to causes more and more abstract. And causes more and more abstract, are
of necessity causes less and less conceivable; since the formation of an
abstract conception involves the dropping of certain concrete elements of
thought. Hence the most abstract conception, to which Science is slowly approaching,
is one that merges into the inconceivable or unthinkable, by the dropping
of all concrete elements of thought. And so is justified the assertion that
the beliefs which Science has forced upon Religion, have been intrinsically
more religious than those which they supplanted.




Science, however, like Religion, has but very incompletely fulfilled its
office. As Religion has fallen short of its function in so far as it has
been irreligious; so has Science fallen short of its function in so far as
it has been unscientific. Let us note the several parallelisms. In its earlier
stages Science, while it began to teach the constant relations of phenomena,
and thus discredited the belief in separate personalities as the causes of
them, itself substituted the belief in casual agencies which, if not personal,
were yet concrete. When certain facts were said to show "Nature's abhorrence
of a vacuum," when the properties of gold were explained as due to some
entity called "aureity," and when the phenomena of life were attributed
to "a vital principle;" there was set up a mode of interpreting
the facts which, while antagonistic to the religious mode, because assigning
other agencies, was also unscientific, because it assumed a knowledge of
that about which nothing was known. Having abandoned these metaphysical agencies
-- having seen that they are not independent existences, but merely special
combinations of general causes, Science has more recently ascribed extensive
groups of phenomena to electricity, chemical affinity, and other like general
powers. But in speaking of these as ultimate and independent entities, Science
has preserved substantially the same attitude as before. Accounting thus
for all phenomena, it has not only maintained its seeming antagonism to Religion,
by alleging agencies of a radically unlike kind; but, in so far as it has
tacitly implied its comprehension of these agencies, it has continued unscientific.
At the present time, however, the most advanced men of science are abandoning
these later conceptions, as their predecessors abandoned the earlier ones.
Magnetism, heat, light, etc., which were early in the century spoken of as
so many distinct imponderables, physicists now regard as different modes
of manifestation of some one universal force; and in so regarding them are
ceasing to think of this force as comprehensible. In each phase of its progress,
Science has thus stopped short with superficial solutions -- has unscientifically
neglected to ask what were the natures of the agents it familiarly invoked.
Though in each succeeding phase it has gone a little deeper, and merged its
supposed agents in more general and abstract ones, it has still, as before,
rested content with these aS if they were ascertained realities. And this,
which has all along been an unscientific characteristic of Science, has all
along been a part-cause of its conflict with Religion.




§30. Thus from the outset the faults of both Religion and Science
have been the faults of imperfect development. Originally a mere rudiment,
each has been growing more complete; the vice of each has in all times been
its incompleteness; the disagreements between them have been consequences
of their incompleteness; and as they reach their final forms they come into
harmony.




The progress of intelligence has throughout been dual. Though it has not
seemed so to those who made it, every step in advance has been a step towards
both the natural and the supernatural. The better interpretation of each
phenomenon has been, on the one hand, the rejection of a cause that was relatively
conceivable in its nature but unknown in the order of its actions, and, on
the other hand, the adoption of a cause that was known in the order of its
actions but relatively inconceivable in its nature. The first advance involved
the conception of agencies less assimilable to the familiar agencies of men
and animals, and therefore less understood; while, at the same time, such
newly-conceived agencies, in so far as they were distinguished by their uniform
effects, were better understood than those they replaced. All subsequent
advances display the same result; and thus the progress has been as much
towards the establishment of a positively unknown as towards the establishment
of a positively known. Though as knowledge advances, unaccountable and seemingly
supernatural facts are brought into the category of facts that are accountable
or natural; yet, at the same time, all accountable or natural facts are proved
to be in their ultimate genesis unaccountable and supernatural. And so there
arise two antithetical states of mind, answering to the opposite sides of
that existence about which we think. While our consciousness of Nature under
the one aspect constitutes Science, our consciousness of it under the other
aspect constitutes Religion.




In other words, Religion and Science have been undergoing a slow differentiation,
and their conflicts have been due to the imperfect separation of their spheres
and functions. Religion has, from the first, struggled to unite more or less
science with its nescience; Science has, from the first, kept hold of more
or less nescience as though it were a part of science. So long as the process
of differentiation is incomplete, more or less of antagonism must continue.
Gradually as the limits of possible cognition are established, the causes
of conflict will diminish. And a permanent peace will be reached when Science
becomes fully convinced that its explanations are proximate and relative,
while Religion becomes fully convinced that the mystery it contemplates is
ultimate and absolute.




Religion and Science are therefore necessary correlatives. To carry further
a metaphor before used,they are the positive and negative poles of thought;
of which neither can gain in intensity without increasing the intensity of
the other.




§31. Some do indeed allege that though the Ultimate Cause of things
cannot really be conceived by us as having specified attributes, it is yet
incumbent upon us to assert those attributes. Though the forms of our consciousness
are such that the Absolute cannot in any manner or degree be brought within
them, we are nevertheless told that we must represent the Absolute to ourselves
as having certain characters. As writes Mr. Mansel, in the work from which
I have already quoted largely -- "It is our duty, then, to think of
God as personal; and it is our duty to believe that He is infinite."




Now if there be any meaning in the foregoing arguments, duty requires
us neither to affirm nor deny personality. Our duty is to submit ourselves
to the established limits of our intelligence, and not perversely to rebel
against them. Let those who can, believe that there is eternal war set between
our intellectual faculties and our moral obligations. I, for one, admit no
such radical vice in the constitution of things.




This which to most will seem an essentially irreligious position, is an
essentially religious one -- nay is the religious one, to which, as already
shown, all others are but approximations. In the estimate it implies of the
Ultimate Cause, it does not fall short of the alternative position, but exceeds
it. Those who espouse this alternative position, assume that the choice is
between personality and something lower than personality; whereas the choice
is rather between personality and something that may be higher. Is it not
possible that there is a mode of being as much transcending Intelligence
and Will, as these transcend mechanical motion? Doubtless we are totally
unable to imagine any such higher mode of being. But this is not a reason
for questioning its existence; it is rather the reverse. Have we not seen
how utterly unable our minds are to form even an approach to a conception
of that which underlies all phenomena? Is it not proved that we fail because
of the incompetency of the Conditioned to grasp the Unconditioned ? Does
it not follow that the Ultimate Cause cannot in any respect be conceived
because it is in every respect greater than can be conceived? And may we
not therefore rightly refrain from assigning to it any attributes whatever,
on the ground that such attributes, derived as they must be from our own
natures, are not elevations but degradations? Indeed it seems strange that
men should Suppose the highest worship to lie in assimilating the object
of their worship to themselves. Not in asserting a transcendent difference,
but in asserting a certain likeness, consists the element of their creed
which they think essential. It is true that from the time when the rudest
savages imagined the causes of things to be persons like themselves but invisible,
down to our own time, the degree of assumed likeness has been diminishing.
But though a bodily form and substance similar to that of man, has long since
ceased, among cultivated races, to be a literally-conceived attribute of
the Ultimate Cause -- though the grosser human desires have been also rejected
as unfit elements of the conception -- though there is some hesitation in
ascribing even the higher human feelings, save in idealized shapes; yet it
is still thought not only proper, but imperative, to ascribe the most abstract
qualities of our nature. To think of the Creative Power as in all respects
anthropomorphous, is now considered impious by men who yet hold themselves
bound to think of the Creative. Power as in some respects anthropomorphous;
and who do not see that the one proceeding is but an evanescent form of the
other. And then, most marvellous of all, this course is persisted in even
by those who contend that we are wholly unable to frame any conception whatever
of the Creative Power. After it has been shown that every supposition respecting
the genesis of the Universe commits us to alternative impossibilities of
thought -- after it has been shown why by the very constitution of our minds,
we are debarred from thinking of the Absolute; it is still asserted that
we ought to think of the Absolute thus and thus. In all ways we find thrust
on us the truth, that we are not permitted to know -- nay are not even permitted
to conceive that Reality which is behind the veil of Appearance; and yet
it is said to be our duty to believe (and in so far to conceive) that this
Reality exists in a certain defined manner. Shall we call this reverence?
or shall we call it the reverse?




Volumes might be written upon the impiety of the pious. Through the printed
and spoken thoughts of religious teachers, may everywhere be traced a professed
familiarity with the ultimate mystery of things, which, to say the least
of it, is anything but congruous with the accompanying expressions of humility.
The attitude thus assumed can be fitly represented only by further developing
a simile long current in theological controversies -- the simile of the watch.
If for a moment we made 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; we should
simply complete a parallel of which religious teachers think much. And were
we to suppose that a watch not only formulated the cause of its existence
in these mechanical terms, but held that watches were bound out of reverence
so to formulate this cause, and even vituperated, as atheistic watches, any
that did not venture so to formulate it; we should merely illustrate the
presumption of theologians by carrying their own argument a step further.
A few extracts will bring home to the reader the justice of this comparison.
We are told, for example, by one of high repute among religious thinkers
that the Universe is "the manifestation and abode of a Free Mind, like
our own; embodying His personal thought in its adjustments, realizing His
own ideal in its phenomena, just as we express our inner faculty and character
through the natural language of an external life. In this view, we interpret
Nature by Humanity; we find the key to her aspects in such purposes and affections
as our own consciousness enables us to conceive; we look everywhere for physical
signals of an ever-living Will; and decipher the universe as the autobiography
of an Infinite Spirit, repeating itself in miniature within our Finite Spirit."
The same writer goes still further. He not only thus parallels the assimilation
of the watchmaker to the watch, -- he not only thinks the created can "decipher"
"the autobiography" of the Creating; but he asserts that the necessary
limits to the one are necessary limits to the other. The primary qualities
of bodies, he says, "belong eternally to the material datum objective
to God" and control his acts; while the secondary ones are "products
of pure Inventive Reason and Determining Will" -- constitute "the
realm of Divine originality." * * * "While on this Secondary field
His Mind and ours are thus contrasted, they meet in resemblance again upon
the Primary; for the evolutions of deductive Reason there is but one track
possible to all intelligences; no merum arbitrium can interchange the false
and true, or make more than one geometry, one scheme of pure Physics, for
all worlds; and the Omnipotent Architect Himself, in realizing the Kosmical
conception, in shaping the orbits out of immensity and determining seasons
out of eternity, could but follow the laws of curvature, measure and proportion."
That is to say the Ultimate Cause is like a human mechanic, not only as "shaping"
the "material datum objective to" Him, but also as being obliged
to conform to the necessary properties of that datum. Nor is this all. There
follows some account of "the Divine psychology," to the extent
of saying that "we learn" "the character of God -- the order
of affections in Him" from "the distribution of authority in the
hierarchy of our impulses." In other words, it is alleged that the Ultimate
Cause has desires that are to be classed as higher and lower like our own.*
<fn* These extracts are from an article entitled " Nature and God,"
published in the National Review for October, 1860, by Dr. Martineau.>
Every one has heard of the king who wished he had been present at the creation
of the world, that he might have given good advice. He was humble, however,
compared with those who profess to understand not only the relation of the
Creating to the created, but also how the Creating is constituted. And yet
this transcendent audacity, which thinks to penetrate the secrets of the
Power manifested through all existence -- nay, even to stand behind that
Power and note the conditions to its action -- this it is which passes current
as piety! May we not affirm that a sincere recognition of the truth that
our own and all other existence is a mystery absolutely beyond our comprehension,
contains more of true religion than all the dogmatic theology ever written?




Meanwhile let us recognize whatever of permanent good there is in these
persistent attempts to frame conceptions of that which cannot be conceived.
From the beginning it has been only through the successive failures of such
conceptions to satisfy the mind, that higher and higher ones have been gradually
reached; and doubtless, the conceptions now current are indispensable as
transitional modes of thought. Even more than this may be willingly conceded.
It is possible, nay probable, that under their most abstract forms, ideas
of this order will always continue to occupy the background of our consciousness.
Very likely there will ever remain a need to give a shape to that indefinite
sense of an Ultimate Existence, which forms the basis of our intelligence.
We shall always be under the necessity of contemplating it as some mode of
being; that is -- of representing it to ourselves in some form of thought,
however vague. And we shall not err in doing this so long as we treat every
notion we thus frame as merely a symbol. Perhaps the constant formation of
such symbols and constant rejection of them as inadequate, may be hereafter,
as it has hitherto been, a means of discipline. Perpetually to construct
ideas requiring the utmost stretch of our faculties, and perpetually to find
that such ideas must be abandoned as futile imaginations, may realize to
us more fully than any other course, the greatness of that which we vainly
strive to grasp. By continually seeking to know and being continually thrown
back with a deepened conviction of the impossibility of knowing, we may keep
alive the consciousness that it is alike our highest wisdom and our highest
duty to regard that through which all things exist as The Unknowable.




§32. An immense majority will refuse, with more or less of indignation,
a belief seeming to them so shadowy and indefinite. "You offer us,"
they will say, "an unthinkable abstraction in place of a Being towards
whom we may entertain definite feelings. Though we are told that the Absolute
is the only reality, yet since we are not allowed to conceive it, it might
as well be a pure negation. Instead of a Power which we can regard as having
some sympathy with us, you would have us contemplate a Power to which no
emotion whatever can be ascribed. And so we are to be deprived of the very
substance of our faith." This kind of protest of necessity accompanies
every change from a lower creed to a higher. The belief in a community of
nature between himself and the object of his worship, has always been to
Man a satisfactory one; and he has always accepted with reluctance those
successively less concrete conceptions which have been forced upon him. Doubtless,
in all times and places, it has consoled the barbarian to think of his deities
as like himself in nature, that they might be bribed by offerings of food;
and the assurance that deities could not be so propitiated must have been
repugnant, because it deprived him of an easy method of gaining supernatural
protection. To the Greeks it was manifestly a source of comfort that on occasions
of difficulty they could obtain, through oracles, the advice of their gods,
-- nay might even get the personal aid of their gods in battle; and it was
probably a very genuine anger which they visited upon philosophers who called
in question these gross ideas of their mythology. A religion which teaches
the Hindoo that is is impossible to purchase eternal happiness by placing
himself under the wheel of Juggernaut, can scarcely fail to seem a cruel
one to him; since it deprives him of the pleasurable consciousness that he
can at will exchange miseries for joys. Nor is it less clear that to our
Catholic ancestors, the beliefs that crimes could be compounded for by the
building of churches, that their own punishments and those of their relatives
could be abridged by the saying of masses, and that divine aid or forgiveness
might be gained through the intercession of saints, were highly solacing
ones; and that Protestantism, in substituting the conception of a God so
comparatively unlike themselves as not to be influenced by such methods,
must have appeared hard and cold. Naturally therefore, we must expect a further
step in the same direction to meet with a similar resistance from outraged
sentiments. No mental revolution can be accomplished without more or less
laceration. Be it a change of habit or a change of conviction, it must, if
the habit or conviction be strong, do violence to some of the feelings; and
these must of course oppose it. For long-experienced, and therefore definite,
sources of satisfaction, have to be substituted sources of satisfaction that
have not been experienced, and are therefore indefinite. That which is relatively
well known and real, has to be given up for that which is relatively unknown
and ideal. And of course such an exchange cannot be made without a conflict
involving pain. Especially, then, must there arise a strong antagonism to
any alteration in so deep and vital a conception as that with which we are
here dealing. Underlying, as this conception does, all ideas conceding the
established order of things, a modification of it threatens to reduce the
superstructure to ruins. Or to change the metaphor -- being the root with
which are connected our ideas of goodness, rectitude, or duty, it appears
impossible that it should be transformed without causing these to wither
away and die. The whole higher part of the nature takes up arms against a
change which seems to eradicate morality.




This is by no means all that has to be said for such protests. There is
a deeper meaning in them. They do not simply express the natural repugnance
to a revolution of belief, here made specially intense by the vital importance
of the belief to be revolutionized; but they also express an instinctive
adhesion to a belief that is in one sense the best -- the best for those
who thus cling to it, though not abstractedly the best. For here it is to
be remarked that what were above spoken of as the imperfections of Religion,
at first great but gradually diminishing, have been imperfections as measured
by an absolute standard, and not as measured by a relative one. Speaking
generally, the religion current in each age and among each people, has been
as near an approximation to the truth as it was then and there possible for
men to receive. The concrete forms in which it has embodied the truth, have
been the means of making thinkable what would otherwise have been unthinkable;
and so have for the time being served to increase its impressiveness. If
we consider the conditions of the case, we shall find this to be an unavoidable
conclusion. During each stage of progress men must think in such terms of
thought as they possess. While all the conspicuous changes of which they
can observe the origins, have men and animals as antecedents, they are unable
to think of antecedents in general under any other shapes; and hence creative
agencies are almost of necessity conceived by them in these shapes. If, during
this phase, these concrete conceptions were taken from them, and the attempt
made to give them comparatively abstract conceptions, the result would be
to leave their minds with none at all; since the substituted ones could not
be mentally represented. Similarly with every successive stage of religious
belief, down to the last. Though, as accumulating experiences slowly modify
the earliest ideas of causal personalities, there grow up more general and
vague ideas of them; yet these cannot be at once replaced by others still
more general and vague. Further experiences must supply the needful further
abstractions, before the mental void left by the destruction of such inferior
ideas can be filled by ideas of a superior order. And at the present time,
the refusal to abandon a relatively concrete consciousness for a relatively
abstract one, implies the inability to frame the relatively abstract one;
and so implies that the change would be premature and injurious. Still more
clearly shall we see the injuriousness of any such premature change, on observing
that the effects of a belief upon conduct must be diminished in proportion
as the vividness with which it is realized becomes less. Evils and benefits
akin to those which the savage has personally felt, or learned from those
who have felt them, are the only evils and benefits he can understand; and
these must be looked for as coming in ways like those of which he has had
experience. His deities must be imagined to have like motives and passions
and methods with the beings around him; for motives and passions and methods
of a higher character being unknown to him, and in great measure unthinkable
by him, cannot be so represented in thought as to influence his deeds. During
every phase of civilization, the actions of the Unseen Reality, as well as
the resulting rewards and punishments, being conceivable only in such forms
as experience furnishes, to supplant them by higher ones be fore wider experiences
have made higher ones conceivable, is to set up vague and uninfluential motives
for definite and influential ones. Even now for the great mass of men, unable
to trace out with clearness those good and bad consequences which conduct
brings round through the established order of things, it is well that there
should be depicted future punishments and future joys -- pains and pleasures
of definite kinds, produced in ways direct and simple enough to be clearly
imagined. Nay still more must be conceded. Few are as yet wholly fitted to
dispense with such conceptions as are current. The highest abstractions take
so great a mental power to realize with any vividness, and are so inoperative
on conduct unless they are vividly realized, that their regulative effects
must for a long period to come be appreciable on but a small minority. To
see clearly how a right or wrong act generates consequences, internal and
external, that go on branching out more widely as years progress, requires
a rare power of analysis. And to estimate these consequences in their totality
requires a grasp of thought possessed by none. Were it not that throughout
the progress of the race, men's experiences of the effects of conduct have
been slowly generalized into principles -- were it not that these principles
have been from generation to generation insisted on by parents, upheld by
public opinion, sanctified by religion, and enforced by threats of eternal
damnation for disobedience -- were it not that under these potent influences
habits have been modified, and the feelings proper to them made innate; disastrous
results would follow the removal of those strong and distinct motives which
the current belief supplies. Even as it is, those who relinquish the faith
in which they have been brought up, for this most abstract faith in which
Science and Religion unite, may not uncommonly fail to act up to their convictions.
Left to their organic morality, enforced only by general reasonings difficult
to keep before the mind, their defects of nature will often come out more
strongly than they would have done under their previous creed. The substituted
creed can become adequately operative only when it becomes, like the present
one, an element in early education, and has the support of a strong social
sanction. Nor will men be quite ready for it until, through the continuance
of a discipline which has partially moulded them to the conditions of social
existence, they are completely moulded to those conditions.




We must therefore recognize the resistance of a change of theological
opinion, as in great measure salutary. Forms of religion, like forms of government,
must be fit for those who live under them; and in the one case as in the
other, the form which is fittest is that for which there is an instinctive
preference. As a barbarous race needs a harsh terrestrial rule, and shows
attachment to a despotism capable of the necessary rigour; so does such a
race need a belief in a celestial rule that is similarly harsh, and shows
attachment to such a belief. And as the sudden substitution of free institutions
for despotic ones, is sure to be followed by a reaction; so, if a creed full
of dreadful ideal penalties is all at once replaced by one presenting ideal
penalties that are comparatively gentle, there will inevitably be a return
to some modification of the old belief. The parallelism holds yet further.
During those early stages in which there is extreme incongruity between the
relatively best and the absolutely best, both political and religious changes,
when at rare intervals they occur, are violent; and they entail violent retrogressions.
But as the incongruity between that which is and that which should be, diminishes,
the changes become more moderate, and are succeeded by more moderate counter-movements;
until, as these movements and counter-movements decrease in amount and increase
in frequency, they merge into an almost continuous growth. This holds true
of religious creeds and forms, as of civil ones. And so we learn that theological
conservatism, like political conservatism, has an important function.




§33. That spirit of toleration which is so marked a trait of modern
times, has thus a deeper meaning than is supposed. What we commonly regard
simply as a due respect for the right of private judgment, is really a necessary
condition to the balancing of the progressive and conservative tendencies
-- is a means of maintaining the adaptation between men's beliefs and their
natures. It is therefore a spirit to be fostered; and especially by the catholic
thinker, who perceives the functions of these conflicting creeds. Doubtless
whoever feels the greatness of the error his fellows cling to and the greatness
of the truth they reject, will find it hard to show a due patience. It is
hard to listen calmly to the futile arguments used in support of irrational
doctrines, and to the misrepresentations of antagonist doctrines. It is hard
to bear the display of that pride of ignorance which so far exceeds the pride
of science. Naturally such a one will be indignant when charged with irreligion
because he declines to accept the carpenter-theory of creation as the most
worthy one. He may think it needless, as it is difficult, to conceal his
repugnance to a creed which tacitly ascribes to The Unknowable a love of
adulation such as would be despised in a human being. Convinced as he is
that pain, as we see it in the order of nature, is an aid to the average
welfare, there will perhaps escape from him an angry condemnation of the
belief that punishment is a divine vengeance, and that divine vengeance is
eternal. He may be tempted to show his contempt when he is told that actions
instigated by an unselfish sympathy or by a pure love of rectitude, are intrinsically
sinful; and that conduct is truly good only when it is due to a faith whose
openly-professed motive is other-worldliness. But he must restrain such feelings.
Though he may be unable to do this during the excitement of controversy,
he must yet qualify his antagonism in calmer moments; so that his mature
judgment and resulting conduct may be without bias.




To this end let him bear in mind three cardinal facts -- two of them already
dwelt on, and one still to be pointed out. The first is that with which we
commenced; namely, the existence of a fundamental verity under all forms
of religion, however degraded. In each of them there is a soul of truth.
The second, set forth at length in the foregoing section, is that while those
concrete elements in which each creed embodies this soul of truth, are bad
as measured by an absolute standard, they are good as measured by a relative
standard. The remaining one is that these various beliefs are parts of the
constituted order of things, and, if not in their special forms yet in their
general forms, necessary parts. Seeing how one or other of them is everywhere
present, is of perennial growth, and when cut down redevelops in a form but
slightly modified, we cannot avoid the inference that they are needful accompaniments
of human life, severally fitted to the societies in which they are indigenous.
We must recognize them as elements in that great evolution of which the beginning
and end are beyond our knowledge or conception -- as modes of manifestation
of The Unknowable, and as having this for their warrant.




Our toleration therefore should be the widest possible. In dealing with
alien beliefs our endeavour must be, not simply to refrain from injustice
of word or deed, but also to do justice by an open recognition of positive
worth. We must qualify our disagreement with as much as may be of sympathy.




§34. These admissions will perhaps be held to imply that the current
theology should be passively accepted, or, at any rate, should not be actively
opposed. "Why," it may be asked, "if creeds are severally
fit for their times and places, should we not rest content with that to which
we are born? If the established belief contains an essential truth -- if
the forms under which it presents this truth, though intrinsically bad, are
extrinsically good -- if the abolition of these forms would be at present
detrimental to the great majority -- nay, if there are scarcely any to whom
the ultimate and most abstract belief can furnish an adequate rule of life;
surely it is wrong, for the present at least, to propagate this ultimate
and most abstract belief."




The reply is that though existing religious ideas and institutions have
an average adaptation to the characters of the people who live under them,
yet, as these characters are ever changing, the adaptation is ever becoming
imperfect. and the ideas and institutions need remodelling with a frequency
proportionate to the rapidity of the change. Hence, while it is requisite
that free play should be given to conservative thought and action, progressive
thought and action must also have free play. Without the agency of both there
cannot be those continual re-adaptations which orderly progress demands.




Whoever hesitates to utter that which he thinks the highest truth, lest
it should be too much in advance of the time, may reassure himself by looking
at his acts from an impersonal point of view. Let him remember that opinion
is the agency through which character adapts external arrangements to itself,
and that his option rightly forms part of this agency -- is a unit of force
constituting with other such units, the general power which works out social
changes; and he will perceive that he may properly give utterance to his
innermost conviction: leaving it to produce what effect it may. It is not
for nothing that he has in him these sympathies with some principles and
repugnance to others. He, with all his capacities, and aspirations, and beliefs,
is not an accident but a product of the time. While he is a descendant of
the past he is a parent of the future; and his thoughts are as children born
to him, which he may not carelessly let die. Like every other man he may
properly consider himself as one of the myriad agencies through whom works
the Unknown Cause; and when the Unknown Cause produces in him a certain belief,
he is thereby authorized to profess and act out that belief. For, to render
in their highest sense the words of the poet --




<poem>

Nature is made better by no mean,

But nature makes that mean: over that art

Which you say adds to nature, is an art

That nature makes.

</poem>




Not as adventitious therefore will the wise man regard the faith which
is in him. The highest truth he sees he will fearlessly utter: knowing that,
let what may come of it, he is thus playing his right part in the world --
knowing that if he can effect the change he aims at -- well; if not -- well
also; though not so well.




Postscript to Part I




OF multitudinous criticisms made on the preceding five chapters since
the publication of First Principles in 1862, it is practicable to notice
only those of chief importance. Even to do this would be impracticable were
it not that most of them are essentially the same and may be met by the same
answers.




Several opponents have contended that it is illegitimate to assert of
the Ultimate Reality lying behind Appearance, that it is unknown and unknowable.
The statement that it is unknowable is said to assume knowledge greater than
we can have: alike as putting an arbitrary limit to possible human faculty
and as asserting something concerning that of which we are said to know nothing:
a contradiction.




To the first of these objections, that an arbitrary limit is put to possible
human faculty an answer has already been given in §24, where it has
been shown that knowledge involves the three elements, Relation, Difference,
Likeness; and that unconditioned existence, of which no one of these can
be affirmed without contradiction, consequently does not present a subject-matter
for knowledge. Further, in the next section it was pointed out that in the
process of knowing there is the same implication. Thinking being relationing,
no thought can express more than relations. From which truth it is inferable
that human faculty must become fundamentally unlike what it is, and knowledge
must become something other than what we call knowledge, before anything
can be known about the Unconditioned.




The second objection is not thus easily met. It is doubtless true that
saying what a thing is not, is, in some measure, saying what it is; since
if, of all possible assertions respecting it, one is cancelled, the cancelling,
by diminishing the number of possible assertions, implies an incipient definition.
A series of statements of what it is not, excluding one possibility after
another, becomes eventually a line of exclusions drawn round it -- a definition
of it. The game of Twenty Questions illustrates this. Hence it cannot be
denied that to affirm of the Ultimate Reality that it is unknowable is, in
a remote way, to assert some knowledge of it, and therefore involves a contradiction.




This extreme case, however, does but serve to bring out the truth that,
limited as our intelligence is to the relative, and obliged as we are to
use words which have been moulded to it, we cannot say anything concerning
the non-relative without carrying into our propositions meanings connoted
by those words -- meanings foreign to a subject-matter which transcends relations.
Intellect being framed simply by and for converse with phenomena, involves
us in nonsense when we try to use it for anything beyond phenomena. This
inability of the thinking faculty in presence of the Unconditioned, is shown
not only by the self-contradictory nature of its product, but also by the
arrest of its process before completion. In attempting to pass the limit
it breaks down before it has finished its first step. For since every thought
expresses a relation -- since thinking is relationing -- thinking ceases
when one of the two terms of a relation remains blank. As the relation is
incomplete there is no thought properly so called: thought fails. So that
we cannot rightly conceive even a connexion between noumenon and phenomenon.
We are unable in any consistent way to assert a Reality standing in some
relation to the Apparent. Such a relation is not truly imaginable.




And yet by the very nature of our intelligence we are compelled continually
to ascribe the effects we know to some cause we do not know -- to regard
the manifestations we are conscious of as implying something manifested.
We find it impossible to think of the world as constituted of appearances,
and to exclude all thought of a reality of which they are appearances. The
inconsistencies in the views set forth are in fact organic. Intellectual
action being a perpetual forming of relations between the states from moment
to moment passing, and being incapable of arresting itself, tends irresistibly
to form them when it reaches the limit of intelligence. The inevitable effect
of our mental constitution is that on reaching the limit thought rushes out
to form a new relation and cannot form it. A conflict hence arises between
an effort to pass into the Unknowable and an inability to pass -- a conflict
which involves the inconsistency of feeling obliged to think something and
being unable to think it.




And here we come as before to the conclusion that while it is impossible
for us to have a conception, there yet ever remains a consciousness -- a
consciousness of which no logical account can be given, but which is the
necessary result of our mental action; since the perpetually-foiled endeavour
to think the relation between Appearance and Reality, ever leaves behind
a feeling that though a second term cannot be framed in thought yet there
is a second term. This distinction, here emphasized as it was emphasized
in §26, my critics have ignored. Their arguments are directed against
one or other elements in a conception which they ascribe to me: forgetting
that, equally with them, I deny the possibility of any conception, and affirm
only that after all our futile attempts to conceive, there remains the undefinable
substance of a conception -- a consciousness which cannot be put into any
shape.




But now let it be understood that the reader is not called on to judge
respecting any of the arguments or conclusions contained in the foregoing
five chapters and in the above paragraphs. The subjects on which we are about
to enter are independent of the subjects thus far discussed; and he may reject
any or all of that which has gone before, while leaving himself free to accept
any or all of that which is now to come.




When drawing up the programme of the Synthetic Philosophy, it appeared
to me that, in the absence of any statement of theologico-metaphysical beliefs,
the general doctrine set forth might be misconstrued; and Part I, "The
Unknowable," was written for the purpose of excluding the possible misconstructions.
Unfortunately I did not foresee that Part I would be regarded as a basis
for Part II; with the result that the acceptance or rejection of the conclusions
in Part I, would be supposed to determine acceptance or rejection of those
in Part II. Very many have in consequence been prevented from reading beyond
this point.




But an account of the Transformation of Things, given in the pages which
follow, is simply an orderly presentation of facts; and the interpretation
of the facts is nothing more than a statement of the ultimate uniformities
they present -- the laws to which they conform. Is the reader an atheist?
the exposition of these facts and these laws will neither yield support to
his belief nor destroy it. Is he a pantheist? The phenomena and the inferences
as now to be set forth will not force on him any incongruous implication.
Does he think that God is immanent throughout all things, from concentrating
nebulae to the thoughts of poets? Then the theory to be put before him contains
no disproof of that view. Does he believe in a Deity who has given unchanging
laws to the Universe? Then he will find nothing at variance with his belief
in an exposition of those laws and an account of the results.




 March, 1899.




Part II




The Knowable




Chapter 1




Philosophy Defined




§35. After concluding that we cannot know the ultimate nature of
that which is manifested to us, there arise the questions -- What is it that
we know? In what sense do we know it? And in what consists our highest knowledge
of it? Having repudiated as impossible the Philosophy which professes to
formulate Being as distinguished from Appearance, it becomes needful to say
what Philosophy truly is -- not simply to specify its limits, but to specify
its character within those limits. Given the sphere to which human intelligence
is restricted, and there remains to define that product of human intelligence
which may still be called Philosophy.




Here, we may fitly avail ourselves of the method followed at the outset
-- that of separating from conceptions which are partial1y or mainly erroneous,
the element of truth they contain. As in the chapter on "Religion and
Science," it was inferred that religious beliefs, wrong as they may
severally be, nevertheless probably each contain an essential verity, and
that this is most likely common to them all; so in this place it is to be
inferred that past and present beliefs respecting the nature of Philosophy,
are none of them wholly false, and that that in which they are true is that
in which they agree. We have here, then, to do what was done there -- to
compare all opinions of the same genus; to set aside as more or less discrediting
one another those elements in which such opinions differ; to observe what
remains after the discordant components have been cancelled; and to find
for this remaining component that expression which holds true throughout
its divergent forms.




§36. Earlier speculations being passed over we see that among the
Greeks, before there had arisen any notion of Philosophy in general, those
particular forms of it from which the general notion was to arise, were hypotheses
respecting some universal principle which was the essence of all kinds of
being. To the question -- "What is that invariable existence of which
these are variable states?" there were sundry answers -- Water, Air,
Fire. A class of suppositions of this all-embracing character having been
propounded, it became Possible for Pythagoras to conceive of Philosophy in
the abstract, as knowledge the most remote from practical ends; and to define
it as "knowledge of immaterial and eternal things;" "the cause
of the material existence of things" being, in his view, Number. Thereafter,
was continued a pursuit of Philosophy as some deepest explanation of the
Universe, assumed to be possible, whether actually reached in any case or
not. And in the course of this pursuit, various such interpretations were
given as that "One is the beginning of all things;" that "the
One is God;" that "the One is Finite;" that "the One
is Infinite;" that "Intelligence is the governing principle of
things;" and so on. From all which it is plain that the knowledge supposed
to constitute Philosophy, differed from other knowledge in its exhaustive
character. After the Sceptics had shaken men's faith in their powers of reaching
such transcendent knowledge, there grew up a much-restricted conception of
Philosophy. Under Socrates, and still more under the Stoics, Philosophy became
little else than the doctrine of right living. Not indeed that the proper
ruling of conduct, as conceived by sundry of the later Greek thinkers to
constitute the subject-matter of Philosophy, answered to what was popularly
understood by the proper ruling of conduct. The injunctions of Zeno were
not of the same class as those which guided men in their daily observances,
sacrifices, customs, all having more or less of religious sanction; but they
were principles of action enunciated without reference to times, or persons,
or special cases. What, then, was the constant element in these unlike ideas
of Philosophy held by the ancients? Clearly this last idea agrees with the
first, in implying that Philosophy seeks for wide and deep truths, as distinguished
from the multitudinous detailed truths which the surfaces of things and actions
present. By comparing the conceptions of Philosophy that have been current
in modern times, we get a like result.




The disciples of Schelling and Fichte join the Hegelian in ridiculing
the so-called Philosophy which has been current in England. Not without reason,
they laugh on reading of "Philosophical instruments;" and would
deny that any one of the papers in the Philosophical Transactions
has the least claim to come under such a title. Retaliating on their critics,
the English may, and most of them do, reject as absurd the imagined Philosophy
of the German schools. They hold that whether consciousness does or does
not vouch for the existence of something beyond itself, it at any rate cannot
comprehend that something; and that hence, in so far as any Philosophy professes
to be an Ontology, it is false. These two views cancel one another over large
parts of their areas. The English criticism on the Germans, cuts off from
Philosophy all that is regarded as absolute knowledge. The German criticism
on the English tacitly implies that if Philosophy is limited to the relative,
it is at any rate not concerned with those aspects of the relative which
are embodied in mathematical formulae, in accounts of physical researches,
in chemical analyses, or in descriptions of species and reports of physiological
experiments. Now what has the too-wide German conception in common with the
conception current among English men of science; which, narrow and crude
as it is, is not so narrow and crude as their misuse of the word philosophical
indicates? The two have this in common, that neither Germans nor English
apply the word to unsystematized knowledge -- to knowledge quite un-co-ordinated
with other knowledge. Even the most limited specialist would not describe
as philosophical, an essay which, dealing wholly with details, manifested
no perception of the bearings of those details on wider truths.




The vague idea of Philosophy thus raised may be rendered more definite
by comparing what has been known in England as Natural Philosophy with that
development of it called Positive Philosophy. Though, as M. Comte admits,
the two consist of knowledge essentially the same in kind; yet, by having
put this kind of knowledge into a more coherent form, he has given it more
of that character to which the term philosophical is applied. Without saying
anything about the character of his co-ordination, it must be conceded that,
by the fact of its co-ordination, the body of knowledge organized by him
has a better claim to the title Philosophy, than has the comparatively-unorganized
body of knowledge named Natural Philosophy.




If subdivisions of Philosophy be contrasted with one another or with the
whole, the same implication comes out. Moral Philosophy and Political Philosophy,
agree with Philosophy at large in the comprehensiveness of their reasonings
and conclusions. Though under the head Moral Philosophy, we treat of human
actions as right or wrong, we do not include special directions for behaviour
in school, at table, or on the Exchange; and though Political Philosophy
has for its topic the conduct of men in their public relations, it does not
concert itself with modes of voting or details of administration. Both of
these sections of Philosophy contemplate particular instances only as illustrating
truths of wide application.




§37. Thus every one of these conceptions implies belief in a possible
way of knowing things more completely than they are known through simple
experiences, mechanically accumulated in memory or heaped up in cyclopaedias.
Though in the extent of the sphere which they have supposed Philosophy to
fill, men have differed and still differ very widely; yet there is a real
if unavowed agreement among them in signifying by this title a knowledge
which transcends ordinary knowledge. That which remains as the common element
in these conceptions of Philosophy, after the elimination of their discordant
elements, is -- knowledge of the highest degree of generality. We see this
tacitly asserted by the simultaneous inclusion of God, Nature, and Man, within
its scope; or still more distinctly by the division of Philosophy as a whole
into Theological, Physical, Ethical, etc. For that which characterizes the
genus of which these are species, must be something more general than that
which distinguishes any one species.




What must be the shape here given to this conception? Though persistently
conscious of a Power manifested to us, we have abandoned as futile the attempt
to learn anything respecting that Power, and so have shut out Philosophy
from much of the domain supposed to belong to it. The domain left is that
occupied by Science. Science concerts itself with the co-existences and sequences
among phenomena; grouping these at first into generalizations of a simple
or low order, and rising gradually to higher and more extended generalizations.
But if so, where remains any subject-matter for Philosophy?




The reply is -- Philosophy may still properly be the title retained for
knowledge of the highest generality. Science means merely the family of the
Sciences -- stands for nothing more than the sum of knowledge formed of their
contributions; and ignores the knowledge constituted by the fusion of these
contributions into a whole. As usage has defined it, Science consists of
truths existing more or less separated, and does not recognize these truths
as entirely integrated. An illustration will make the difference clear.




If we ascribe the flow of a river to the same force which causes the fall
of a stone, we make a statement that belongs to a certain division of Science.
If, to explain how gravitation produces this movement in a direction almost
horizontal, we cite the law that fluids subject to mechanical forces exert
re-active forces which are equal in all directions, we formulate a wider
truth, containing the scientific interpretations of many other phenomena;
as those presented by the fountain, the hydraulic press, the steam-engine,
the air-pump. And when this proposition, extending only to the dynamics of
fluids, is merged in a proposition of general dynamics, comprehending the
laws of movement of solids as well as of fluids, there is reached a yet higher
truth; but still a truth that comes wholly within the realm of Science. Again,
looking around at Birds and Mammals, suppose we say that air-breathing animals
are hot-blooded; and that then, remembering how Reptiles, which also breathe
air, are not much warmer than their media, we say, more truly, that animals
(bulks being equal) have temperatures proportionate to the quantities of
air they breathe; and that then, calling to mind certain large fish, as the
tunny, which maintain a heat considerably above that of the water they swim
in, we further correct the generalization by saying that the temperature
varies as the rate of oxygenation of the blood; and that then, modifying
the statement to meet other criticisms, we finally assert the relation to
be between the amount of heat and the amount of molecular change -- supposing
we do all this, we state scientific truths that are successively wider and
more complete, but truths which, to the last, remain purely scientific. Once
more if, guided by mercantile experiences, we reach the conclusions that
prices rise when the demand exceeds the supply; that commodities flow from
places where they are abundant to places where they are scarce; that the
industries of different localities are determined in their kinds mainly by
the facilities which the localities afford for them; and if, studying these
generalizations of political economy, we trace them all to the truth that
each man seeks satisfaction for his desires in ways costing the smallest
efforts -- such social phenomena being resultants of individual actions so
guided; we are still dealing with the propositions of Science only.




How, then, is Philosophy constituted? It is constituted by carrying a
stage further the process indicated. So long as these truths are known only
apart and regarded as independent, even the most general of them cannot without
laxity of speech be called philosophical. But when, having been severally
reduced to a mechanical axiom, a principle of molecular physics, and a law
of social action, they are contemplated together as corollaries of some ultimate
truth, then we rise to the kind of knowledge which constitutes Philosophy
proper.




The truths of Philosophy thus bear the same relation to the highest scientific
truths, that each of these bears to lower scientific truths. As each widest
generalization of Science comprehends and consolidates the narrower generalizations
of its own division; so the generalizations of Philosophy comprehend and
consolidate the widest generalizations of Science. It is therefore a knowledge
the extreme opposite in kind to that which experience first accumulates.
It is the final product of that process which begins with a mere colligation
of crude observations, goes on establishing propositions that are broader
and more separated from particular cases, and ends in universal propositions.
Or to bring the definition to its simplest and clearest form: -- Knowledge
of the lowest kind is un-unified knowledge; Science is partially-unified
knowledge; Philosophy is completely-unified knowledge.




§38. Such, at least, is the meaning we must here give to the word
Philosophy, if we employ it at all. In so defining it, we accept that which
is common to the various conceptions of it current among both ancients and
moderns -- rejecting those elements in which these conceptions disagree.
In short, we are simply giving precision to that application of the word
which has been gradually establishing itself.




Two forms of Philosophy as thus understood, may be distinguished and dealt
with separately. On the one hand, the things contemplated may be the universal
truths: all particular truths referred to being used simply for proof or
elucidation of these universal truths. On the other hand, setting out with
the universal truths, the things contemplated may be the particular truths
as interpreted by them. In both cases we deal with the universal truths;
but in the one case they are passive and in the other case active -- in the
one case they form the products of exploration and in the other case the
instruments of exploration. These divisions we may appropriately call General
Philosophy and Special Philosophy respectively.




The remainder of this volume will he devoted to General Philosophy. Special
Philosophy, divided into parts determined by the natures of the phenomena
treated, will be the subject-matter of subsequent volumes.




Chapter 2




The Data of Philosophy




§39. Every thought involves a whole system of thoughts and ceases
to exist if severed from its various correlatives. As we cannot isolate a
single organ of a living body, and deal with it as though it had a life independent
of the rest, so, from the organized structure of our cognitions, we cannot
cut out one, and proceed as though it had survived the separation. The development
of formless protoplasm into an embryo is a specialization of parts, the definiteness
of which increases only as fast as their combination increases. Each becomes
a distinguishable organ only on condition that it is bound up with others,
which have simultaneously become distinguishable organs. Similarly, from
the unformed material of consciousness, a developed intelligence can arise
only by a process which, in making thoughts defined also makes them mutually
dependent -- establishes among them certain vital connexions the destruction
of which causes instant death of the thoughts. Overlooking this all-important
truth, however, speculators have habitually set out with some professedly
-- simple datum or data; have supposed themselves to assume nothing beyond
this datum or these data; and have thereupon proceeded to prove or disprove
propositions which were, by implication, already unconsciously asserted along
with that which was consciously asserted.




This reasoning in a circle has resulted from the misuse of words: not
that misuse commonly enlarged upon -- not the misapplication or change of
meaning whence so much error arises; but a more radical and less obvious
misuse. Only that thought which is directly indicated by each word has been
contemplated; while numerous thoughts indirectly indicated have been left
out of consideration. Because a spoken or written word can be detached from
all others, it has been inadvertently assumed that the thing signified by
a word can be detached from the things signified by all other words. How
profoundly this error vitiates the conclusions of one who makes it, we shall
quickly see on taking a case. The sceptical metaphysician, wishing his reasonings
to be as rigorous as possible, says to himself -- "I will take for granted
only this one thing." What now are the tacit assumptions inseparable
from his avowed assumption? The resolve itself indirectly asserts that there
is some other thing, or are some other things, which he might assume; for
it is impossible to think of unity without thinking of a correlative duality
or multiplicity. In the very act, therefore, of restricting himself, he takes
in much that is professedly left out. Again, before proceeding he must give
a definition of that which he assumes. Is nothing unexpressed involved in
the thought of a thing as defined? There is the thought of something excluded
by the definition -- there is, as before, the thought of other existence.
But there is much more. Defining a thing, or setting a limit to it, implies
the thought of a limit; and limit cannot be thought of apart from some notion
of quantity extensive, protensive, or intensive. Further, definition is impossible
unless there enters into it the thought of difference; and difference, besides
being unthinkable without having two things that differ, implies the existence
of other differences than the one recognized; since without them there cannot
have been formed the general conception of difference. Nor is this all. As
before potted out (§24) all thought involves the consciousness of likeness:
the one thing avowedly postulated cannot be known absolutely as one thing,
but can be known only as of such or such kind -- only as classed with other
things in virtue of some common attribute. Thus, along with the single avowed
datum, we have surreptitiously brought in a number of unavowed data -- existence
other than that alleged, quantity, number, limit, difference, likeness, class,
attribute. Now in these unacknowledged postulates, we have the outlines of
a general theory; and that theory can be neither proved nor disproved by
the metaphysician's argument. Insist that his symbol shall be interpreted
at every step into its full meaning, with all the complementary thoughts
implied by that meaning, and you find already taken for granted in the premisses
that which in the conclusion is asserted or denied.




In what way, then, must Philosophy set out? The developed intelligence
is framed upon certain organized and consolidated conceptions of which it
cannot divest itself; and which it can no more stir without using than the
body can stir without help of its limbs. In what way, then, is it possible
for intelligence, striving after Philosophy, to give any account of these
conceptions, and to show either their validity or their invalidity? There
is but one way. Those of them which are vital, or cannot be severed from
the rest without mental dissolution, must be assumed as true provisionally.
The fundamental intuitions that are essential to the process of thinking,
must be temporarily accepted as unquestionable: leaving the assumption of
their unquestionableness to be justified by the results.




§40. How is it to be justified by the results? As any other assumption
is justified -- by ascertaining that all the conclusions deducible from it
correspond with the facts as directly observed -- by showing the agreement
between the experiences. There is no mode of establishing the validity of
any belief except that of showing its congruity with all other beliefs. If
we suppose that a mass which has a certain colour and lustre is the substance
called gold, how do we proceed to prove that it is gold? We represent to
ourselves certain other impressions which gold produces on us, and then observe
whether, under the appropriate conditions, this particular mass produces
on us such impressions. We remember that gold has a high specific gravity;
and if, on poising this substance on the finger, we find that its weight
is great considering its bulk, we take the correspondence between the represented
impression and the presented impression as further evidence that the substance
is gold. Knowing that gold, unlike most metals, is insoluble in nitric acid,
we imagine to ourselves a drop of nitric acid placed on the surface of this
yellow, glittering, heavy substance, without causing corrosion; and when,
after so placing a drop of nitric acid, no effervescence or other change
follows, we hold this agreement between the anticipation and the experience
to be an additional reason for thinking that the substance is gold. And if,
similarly, the great malleability assessed by gold we find to be paralleled
by the great malleability of this substance; if, like gold, it fuses at about
2,000 deg.; crystallizes in octahedrons; is dissolved by selenic acid; and,
under all conditions, does what gold does under such conditions; the conviction
that it is gold reaches what we regard as the highest certainty -- we know
it to be gold in the fullest sense of knowing. For, as we here see, our whole
knowledge of gold consists in nothing more than the consciousness of a definite
set of impressions, standing in definite relations, disclosed under definite
conditions; and if, in a present experience, the impressions, relations,
and conditions, perfectly correspond with those in past experiences, the
cognition has all the validity of which it is capable. So that, generalizing
the statement, hypotheses, down even to those simple ones which we make from
moment to moment in our acts of recognition, are verified when entire congruity
is found between the states of consciousness constituting them, and certain
other states of consciousness given in perception, or reflection, or both;
and no other knowledge is possible for us than that which consists of the
consciousness of such congruities and their correlative incongruities.




Hence Philosophy, compelled to make those fundamental assumptions without
which thought is impossible, has to justify them by showing their congruity
with all other dicta of consciousness. Debarred as we are from everything
beyond the relative, truth, raised to its highest form, can be for us nothing
more than perfect agreement, throughout the whole range of our experience,
between those representations of things which we distinguish as ideal and
those presentations of things which we distinguish as real. If, by discovering
a proposition to be untrue, we mean nothing more than discovering a difference
between a thing inferred and a thing perceived; then a body of conclusions
in which no such difference anywhere occurs, must be what we mean by an entirely
true body of conclusions.




And here, indeed, it becomes also obvious that, setting out with these
fundamental intuitions provisionally assumed to be true, the process of proving
or disproving their congruity with all other dicta of consciousness becomes
the business of Philosophy; and the complete establishment of the congruity
becomes the same thing as the complete unification of knowledge in which
Philosophy reaches its goal.




§41. What is this datum, or rather, what are these data, which Philosophy
cannot do without? Clearly one primordial datum is involved in the foregoing
statement. Already by implication we have assumed that congruities and incongruities
exist, and are cognizable by us. We cannot avoid accepting as true the verdict
of consciousness that some manifestations are like one mother md some are
unlike one another. Unless consciousness be a competent judge of the likeness
and unlikeness of its states, there can never be established that congruity
throughout the whole of our cognitions which constitutes Philosophy; nor
can there ever be established that incongruity by which only any hypothesis,
Philosophical or other, can be shown erroneous.




It is useless to say, as Sir W. Hamilton does, that "consciousness
is to be presumed trustworthy until proved mendacious." It cannot be
proved mendacious in this, its primordial act; since proof involves a repeated
aCceptance of this primordial act. Nay more, the very thing supposed to be
proved cannot be expressed without recognizing this primordial act as valid;
since unless we accept the verdict of consciousness that they differ, mendacity
and trustworthiness become identical. Process and product of reasoning both
disappear in the absence of this assumption.




It may, indeed, be often shown that what, after careless comparison, were
supposed to be like states of consciousness, are really unlike; or that what
were carelessly supposed to be unlike, are really like. But how is this shown?
Simply by a more careful comparison, mediately or immediately made. And what
does acceptance of the revised conclusion imply? Simply that a deliberate
verdict of consciousness is preferable to a rash one; or, to speak more definitely
-- that a consciousness of likeness or difference which survives critical
examination must be accepted in place of one that does not survive -- the
very survival being itself the acceptance.




And here we get to the bottom of the matter. The permanence of a consciousness
of likeness or difference, is our ultimate warrant for asserting the existence
of likeness or difference; and, in fact, we mean by the existence of likeness
or difference, nothing more than the permanent consciousness of it. To say
that a given congruity or incongruity exists, is simply our way of saying
that we invariably have a consciousness of it along with a consciousness
of the compared things. We know nothing more of existence than continued
manifestation.




§42. But Philosophy requires for its datum some substantive proposition.
To recognize as unquestionable a certain fundamental process of thought,
is not enough: we must recognize as unquestionable some fundamental product
of thought, reached by this process. If Philosophy is completely -- unified
knowledge -- if the unification of knowledge is to be effected only by showing
that some ultimate proposition includes and consolidates all the results
of experience; then, clearly, this ultimate proposition which has to be proved
congruous with all others, must express a piece of knowledge, and not the
validity of an act of knowing. Having assumed the trustworthiness of consciousness,
we have also to assume as trustworthy some deliverance of consciousness.




What must this be? Must it not be one affirming the widest and most profound
distinction which things present? An ultimate principle that is to unify
all experience, must be co-extensive with all experience. That which Philosophy
takes as its datum, must be an assertion of some likeness and difference
to which all other likenesses and differences are secondary. If knowing is
classifying, or grouping the like and separating the unlike; and if the unification
of knowledge proceeds by arranging the smaller classes of like experiences
within the larger, and these within the still larger; then, the proposition
by which knowledge is unified, must be one specifying the antithesis between
two ultimate classes of experiences, in which all others merge.




Let us consider what these classes are. In drawing the distinction between
them, we cannot avoid using words which have implications wider than their
meanings -- we cannot avoid arousing thoughts that imply the very distinction
which it is the object of the analysis to establish. Keeping this fact in
mind, we can do no more than ignore the connotations of the words, and attend
only to the things they avowedly denote.




§43. Setting out from the conclusion lately reached, that all things
known to us are manifestations of the Unknowable, and suppressing every hypothesis
respecting that which underlies one or other order of these manifestations;
we find that the manifestations, considered simply as such, are divisible
into two great classes, called by some impressions and ideas, The implications
of these words are apt to vitiate the reasonings of those who use the words;
and it is best to avoid the risk of making unacknowledged assumptions. The
term sensation, too, commonly used as the equivalent of impression, implies
certain psychological theories -- tacitly, if not openly, postulates a sensitive
organism and something acting upon it: and can scarcely be employed without
bringing these postulates into the thoughts and including them in the inferences.
Similarly, the phrase state of consciousness, as signifying either an impression
or an idea, is objectionable. As we cannot think of a state without thinking
of something of which it is a state, and which is capable of different states,
there is involved a foregone conclusion -- an undeveloped system of metaphysics.
Here, accepting the inevitable implication that the manifestations imply
something manifested, our aim must be to avoid any further implications.
Though we cannot exclude further implications from our thoughts, and cannot
carry on our argument without tacit recognitions of them, we can at any rate
refuse to recognize them in the terms with which we set out. We may do this
most effectually by classing the manifestations as vivid and faint respectively.
Let us consider what are the several distinctions that exist between these.




And first a few words on this most conspicuous distinction which these
names imply. Manifestations that occur under the conditions called those
of perception (which conditions we must separate from all hypotheses, and
regard as themselves a certain group of manifestations) are ordinarily far
more distinct than those which occur under the conditions known as those
of reflection, or memory, or imagination, or ideation. These vivid manifestations
do, indeed, sometimes differ but little from the faint ones. When it is nearly
dark we may be unable to decide whether a certain manifestation belongs to
the vivid order or the faint order -- whether as we say, we really see something
or fancy we see it. In like manner, between a very feeble sound and the imagination
of a sound, it is occasionally difficult to discriminate. But these exceptional
cases are extremely rare in comparison with the enormous mass of cases in
which, from instant to instant, the vivid manifestations distinguish themselves
unmistakeably from the faint. Conversely, it now and then happens (though
under conditions which we distinguish as abnormal) that manifestations of
the faint order become so strong as to be mistaken for those of the vivid
order. Ideal sights and sounds are in the insane so much intensified as to
be classed with real sights and sounds -- ideal and real being here supposed
to imply no other contrast than that which we are considering. These cases
of illusion, as we call them, bear, however, so small a ratio to the great
mass of cases, that we may safely neglect them, and Say that the relative
faintness of manifestations of the second order is so marked, that we are
never in doubt as to their distinctness from those of the first order. Or
if we recognize the exceptional occurrence of doubt, the recognition serves
but to introduce the significant fact that we have other means of deciding
to which order a particular manifestation belongs, when the test of comparative
vividness fails us.




Manifestations of the vivid order precede, in our experience, those of
the faint order. To put the facts in historical sequence -- there is first
a presented manifestation of the vivid order, and then, afterwards. may come
a represented manifestation that is like it except in being much less distinct.
After having those vivid manifestations known as particular places and persons
and things, we can have those faint manifestations which we call recollections
of the places, persons, and things, but cannot have these previously. Before
tasting certain substances and smelling certain perfumes, we are without
those faint manifestations called ideas of their tastes and smells; and where
certain orders of the vivid manifestations are shut out (as the visible from
the blind and the audible from the deaf) the corresponding faint manifestations
never come into existence. It is true that special faint manifestations precede
the vivid. What we call a conception of a machine may presently be followed
by a vivid manifestation matching it -- a so-called actual machine. But in
the first place this occurrence of the vivid manifestation after the faint
is not either spontaneous or easy like that of the faint after the vivid.
And in the second place, though a faint manifestation of this kind may occur
before the vivid one answering to it, yet its component parts may not. Without
the foregoing vivid manifestations of wheels and bars and cranks, the inventor
could have no faint manifestation of his new machine. Thus it cannot be denied
that the two orders of manifestations are distinguished from one another
as independent and dependent.




Note next that they form concurrent series; or rather let us call them,
not series, which implies linear arrangements, but heterogeneous streams
or processions. These run side by side; each now broadening and now narrowing,
each now threatening to obliterate its neighbour and now in turn threatened
with obliteration, but neither ever quite excluding the other from their
common channel. Let us watch the mutual actions of the two currents. During
what we call states of activity, the vivid manifestations predominate. We
simultaneously receive many and varied presentations -- a crowd of sights,
sounds, resistances, tastes, odours, etc.; some groups of them changing and
others temporarily fixed, but altering as we move; and when we compare in
its breadth and massiveness this stream of vivid manifestations with the
stream of faint ones, these last sink into relative insignificance. They
never wholly disappear, however. Always along with the vivid manifestations,
even in their greatest obtrusiveness, there goes a thread called thoughts
constituted of the faint manifestations. Or if it be contended that the occurrence
of a deafening explosion or an intense pain may for a moment exclude every
idea, it must yet be admitted that such breach of continuity can never be
immediately known as occurring; since the act of knowing is impossible in
the absence of ideas. On the other hand, after certain vivid manifestations
which we call the acts of closing the eyes and adjusting ourselves so as
to enfeeble the vivid manifestations called pressures, sounds, etc., the
faint manifestations become relatively predominant. The current of them,
no longer obscured by the vivid current, grows distinct, and seems almost
to exclude the vivid current. But the vivid manifestations, however small
the current of them becomes, still continue: pressure and touch do not wholly
disappear. It is only during the state termed sleep, that manifestations
of the vivid order cease to be distinguishable as such, and those of the
faint order come to be mistaken for them. And even of this we remain unaware
till manifestations of the vivid order recur on awaking. We can never inter
that manifestations of the vivid order have been absent, until they are again
present; and can therefore never directly know them to be absent. Thus, of
the two streams of manifestations, each preserves its continuity. As they
flow side by side, either trenches on the other; but at no moment can it
be said that the one has, then and there, broken through the other.




Besides this longitudinal cohesion there is a lateral cohesion, both of
the vivid to the vivid and of the faint to the faint. The components of the
vivid series are bound together by ties of co-existence as well as by ties
of succession; and the components of the faint series are similarly bound
together. Between the degrees of union in the two cases there are, however,
marked and very significant differences. Let us observe them. Over a limited
area of consciousness, as we name this double stream, lights and shades and
colours and outlines constitute a group to which we give a certain name distinguishing
it as an object; and while they continue present, these united vivid manifestations
remain inseparable. So, too, is it with co-existing groups of manifestations:
each persists as a special combination; and most of them preserve unchanging
relations with those around. Such of them as do not -- such of them as are
capable of what we call independent movements, nevertheless show us a constant
connexion between certain of the manifestations they include, along with
a variable connexion of others. And though after certain vivid manifestations
known as a change in the conditions of perception, there is a change in the
proportions among the vivid manifestations constituting any group, their
cohesion continues. Turning to the faint manifestations, we see that their
lateral cohesions are much less extensive, and in most cases by no means
so rigorous. After the group of feelings I call closing my eyes, I can represent
an object now standing in a certain place, as standing in some other place,
or as absent. While I look at a blue vase, I cannot separate the vivid manifestation
of blueness from the vivid manifestation of a particular shape; but, in the
absence of these vivid manifestations, I can separate the faint manifestation
of the shape from the faint manifestation of blueness, and replace the last
by a faint manifestation of redness, and I can also change the shape and
the size of the vase to any extent. It is so throughout: the faint manifestations
cling together to a certain extent, but most of them may be re-arranged with
facility. Indeed none of the individual faint manifestations cohere in the
same indissoluble way as do the individual vivid manifestations. Though along
with a faint manifestation of pressure there is always some faint manifestation
of extension, yet no particular faint manifestation of extension is bound
up with a particular faint manifestation of pressure. So that whereas in
the vivid order the individual manifestations cohere indissolubly usually
in large groups, in the faint order the individual manifestations none of
them cohere indissolubly, and are most of them loosely aggregated: the only
indissoluble cohesions among them being between certain of their generic
forms.




While the components of each current cohere strongly with their neighbours
of the same current, most of them do not cohere strongly with those of the
other current. Or, more correctly, we may say that the vivid current unceasingly
flows on quite undisturbed by the faint current; and that the faint current,
though often largely determined by the vivid, and always to some extent carried
with it, may yet maintain a substantial independence, letting the vivid current
slide by. We will glance at the interactions of the two. Save in peculiar
cases hereafter to be dealt with, the faint manifestations fail to modify
in the slightest degree the vivid manifestations. Those vivid manifestations,
which I know as components of a landscape, as surgings of the sea, as whistlings
of the wind, as movements of vehicles and people, are absolutely uninfluenced
by the accompanying faint manifestations which I know as my ideas. On the
other hand, the current of faint manifestations is always perturbed by the
vivid. Frequently it consists mainly of faint manifestations which cling
to the vivid ones, and are carried with them as they pass, memories and suggestions
as we call them. At other times when, as we say, absorbed in thought, the
disturbance of the faint current is but superficial. The vivid manifestations
drag after them such few faint manifestations only as constitute recognitions
of them: to each impression adhere certain ideas which make up the interpretation
of it as such or such, and sometimes not even this cohesion happens. But
there meanwhile flows on a main stream of faint manifestations wholly unrelated
to the vivid manifestations -- what we call a reverie, perhaps, or it may
be a process of reasoning. And occasionally, during the state known as absence
of mind, this current of faint manifestations so far predominates that the
vivid current scarcely affects it at all. Hence, these concurrent series
of manifestations, each coherent with itself longitudinally and transversely
have but a partial coherence with one another. The vivid series is quite
unmoved by its passing neighbour; and though the faint series is always to
some extent moved by the adjacent vivid series, and is often carried bodily
along with the vivid series, it may nevertheless become in great measure
separate.




Yet another all-important difference has to be named. The conditions under
which these two orders of manifestations occur, are unlike; and the conditions
of occurrence of each order belong to itself. Whenever the immediate antecedents
of vivid manifestations are traceable, they prove to be other vivid manifestations;
and though we cannot say that the antecedents of the faint manifestations
always lie wholly among themselves, yet the essential ones do. These statements
need a good deal of explanation. Changes among the motions and sounds and
aspects of what we call objects, are either changes that follow certain other
motions, sounds, and aspects, or changes of which the antecedents are unapparent.
Some of the vivid manifestations, however, occur only under conditions that
seem of another order. Those known as colours and visible forms presuppose
open eyes. But what is opening of the eyes, translated into the terms we
are here using? Literally it is an occurrence of certain vivid manifestations.
The preliminary idea of opening the eyes does, indeed, consist of faint manifestations,
but the act of opening them consists of vivid manifestations. And the like
is still more obviously the case with those movements of the eyes and the
head which are followed by new groups of vivid manifestations. Similarly
with the antecedents to the vivid manifestations which we distinguish as
touch and pressure. All the changeable ones have for their conditions of
occurrence certain vivid manifestations called sensations of muscular tension.
It is true that the conditions to these conditions are manifestations of
the faint order -- those ideas of muscular actions which precede muscular
actions. And here arises a complication, for what is called the body, is
present to us as a set of vivid manifestations connected with the faint manifestations
in a special way-a way such that in it alone certain vivid manifestations
are capable of being produced by faint manifestations. There must be named,
too, the kindred exception furnished by the emotions -- an exception which,
however, serves to enforce the general proposition. For while it is true
that the emotions must be classed as vivid manifestations, which admit of
being produced by the faint manifestations we call ideas; it is also true
that because the conditions to their occurrence thus exist among the faint
manifestations, we regard them as belonging to the same general aggregate
as the faint manifestations -- do not class them with such other vivid manifestations
as colours, sounds pressures, smells, etc. But omitting these peculiar vivid
manifestations which we know as muscular tensions and emotions, we may say
of the rest, that their antecedents are manifestations belonging to their
own class. In the parallel current we find a parallel truth. Though many
manifestations of the faint order are partly caused by manifestations of
the vivid order, which call up memories, as we say, and suggest inferences,
yet these results mainly depend on certain antecedents belonging to the faint
order. A cloud drifts across the Sun, and may or may not change the current
of ideas: the inference that it will rain may arise, or the previous train
of thought may continue -- a difference determined by conditions among the
thoughts. Again, such power as a vivid manifestation has of causing certain
faint manifestations depends on the pre-existence of appropriate faint manifestations.
If I have never heard a curlew, the cry which an unseen one makes, fails
to produce an idea of the bird. And on remembering what various trains of
thought are aroused by the same sight, we see that the occurrence of each
faint manifestation chiefly depends on its relations to other faint manifestations
that have gone before or co-exist.




Here we are introduced, lastly, to one of the most important of the differences
between those two orders of manifestations. The conditions of occurrence
are not distinguished solely by the fact that each set, when identifiable,
belongs to its own order of manifestations. They are further distinguished
in a very significant way. Manifestations of the faint order have traceable
antecedents; can be made to occur by establishing their conditions of occurrence;
and can be suppressed by establishing other conditions. But manifestations
of the vivid order continually occur without previous presentation of their
antecedents; and in many cases they persist or cease in such ways as to show
that their antecedents are beyond control. The sensation known as a flash
of lightning, breaks across the current of our thoughts absolutely without
notice. The sounds from a band that strikes up in the street or from a crash
of china in the next room, are not connected with any previously-present
manifestations, either of the faint order or of the vivid order. Often these
vivid manifestations, arising unexpectedly, persist in thrusting themselves
across the current of the faint ones; which not only cannot directly affect
them, but cannot even indirectly affect them. A wound produced by a blow
from behind, is a vivid manifestation the conditions of occurrence of which
were neither among the faint nor among the vivid; and the conditions to the
persistence of which are bound up with the vivid manifestations in some unmanifested
way. So that whereas in the faint order, the conditions of occurrence are
always among the pre-existing or co-existing manifestations; in the vivid
order, the conditions of occurrence are often neither present nor can be
made present.




Let me briefly enumerate these distinctive characters. Manifestations
of the one order are vivid and those of the other are faint. Those of the
one order are originals, while those of the other are copies. The first form
with one another a heterogeneous current that is never broken; and the second
also form with one another a heterogeneous current that is never broken:
or, to speak strictly, no breakage of either is ever directly known. Those
of the first order cohere with one another, not only longitudinally but also
transversely; as also do those of the second order with one another. Between
manifestations of the first order the cohesions, both longitudinal and transverse,
are indissoluble by any direct action of the second order; but between manifestations
of the second order, these cohesions are most of them dissoluble with ease.
While the members of each current are so coherent with one another that it
cannot be broken, the two currents, running side by side, have but little
coherence. The conditions under which manifestations of either order occur,
themselves belong to that order; but whereas in the faint order the conditions
are always present, in the vivid order they are often not present, but lie
somewhere outside of the series. Seven separate characters, then, mark off
these two orders of manifestations from one another.




§44. What is the meaning of this? The foregoing analysis was commenced
in the belief that the proposition postulated by Philosophy, must affirm
some ultimate classes of likenesses and unlikenesses, in which all other
classes merge; and here we have found that all manifestations of the Unknowable
are divisible into two such classes. What is the division equivalent to?




Obviously it corresponds to the division between object and Subject. This
profoundest distinction among manifestations of the Unknowable, we recognize
by grouping them into self and not-self. These faint manifestations, forming
a continuous whole differing from the other in the quantity, quality, cohesion,
and conditions of existence of its parts, we call the ego; and these vivid
manifestations, bound together in relatively-immense masses, and having independent
conditions of existence, we call the non-ego. Or rather, more truly -- each
order of manifestations carries with it the irresistible implication of some
power that manifests itself; and by the words ego and non-ego respectively,
we mean the power that manifests itself in the faint forms, and the power
that manifests itself in the vivid forms.




This segregation of the manifestations and coalescence of them into two
distinct wholes, is in great part spontaneous, and precedes all deliberate
judgments; though it is endorsed by such judgments when they come to be made.
For the manifestations of each order have not simply that kind of union implied
by grouping them as belonging to the same class, but they have that much
more intimate union implied by cohesion, Their cohesive union exhibits itself
before any acts of classing take place. So that, in truth, these two orders
of manifestations are substantially self-separated and self-consolidated.
The members of each, by clinging to one another and parting from their opposites,
themselves form the united wholes known as object and subject. It is this
self-union of their members which gives to these wholes formed of them, their
individualities as wholes, and that separateness from each other which transcends
judgment; and judgment merely aids by assigning to their respective classes,
such manifestations as have not distinctly united themselves with the rest
of their kind.




One further perpetually-repeated act of judgment there is, indeed, which
strengthens this fundamental antithesis, and gives a vast extension to one
term of it. We continually learn that while the conditions of occurrence
of faint manifestations are always to be found, the conditions of occurrence
of vivid manifestations are often not to be found. We also continually learn
that vivid manifestations which have no perceivable antecedents among the
vivid manifestations, are like certain preceding ones which had perceivable
antecedents among the vivid manifestations. Junction of these two experiences
produces the irresistible belief that some vivid manifestations have conditions
of occurrence existing out of the current of vivid manifestations -- existing
as potential vivid manifestations capable of becoming actual. And so we are
made conscious of an indefinitely-extended region of power or being, not
merely separate from the current of faint manifestations constituting the
phenomenal ego, but lying beyond the current of vivid manifestations constituting
the immediately-present portion of the phenomenal non-ego.




§45. In a very imperfect way, passing over objections and omitting
needful explanations, I have thus indicated the nature and justification
of that fundamental belief which Philosophy requires as a datum. I might,
indeed, safely have assumed this ultimate truth; which Common Sense asserts,
which every step in Science takes for granted, and which no metaphysician
ever for a moment succeeded in expelling from consciousness. But as all that
follows proceeds upon this postulate, it seemed desirable briefly to show
its warrant, with the view of shutting out criticisms which might else be
made. It seemed desirable to prove that this deepest cognition is neither,
as the idealist asserts, an illusion, nor as the sceptic thinks, of doubtful
worth, nor as is held by the natural realist, an inexplicable intuition;
but that it is a legitimate deliverance of consciousness elaborating its
materials after the laws of its normal action. While, in order of time, the
establishment of this distinction precedes all reasoning; and while, running
through our mental structure as it does, we are debarred from reasoning about
it without taking for granted its existence; analysis nevertheless enables
us to justify the assertion of its existence, by showing that it is also
the outcome of a primary classification based on accumulated likenesses and
accumulated differences. In other words -- Reasoning, which is itself but
a formation of cohesions among manifestations, here strengthens, by the cohesions
it forms, the cohesions which it finds already existing.




Before proceeding a further preliminary is needed. The manifestations
of the Unknowable, separated into the two divisions of self and not-self,
are re-divisible into certain most general forms, the reality of which Science,
as well as Common Sense, from moment to moment assumes. In the chapter on
"Ultimate Scientific Ideas," it was shown that we know nothing
of these forms, considered t themselves. As, nevertheless, we must continue
to use the words signifying them, it is needful to say what interpretations
are to be put on these words.




Chapter 3




Space, Time, Matter, Motion, and Force




§46. That sceptical state of mind which the criticism of Philosophy
usually produce, is, in great measure, caused by the misinterpretation of
words. These have by association acquired meanings quite different from those
given to them in philosophical discussion; and the ordinary meanings being
unavoidably suggested, there results more or less of that dream-like illusion
which is so incongruous with our instinctive convictions. The word phenomenon
and its equivalent word appearance, are in great part to blame for this.
In ordinary speech these always imply visual perceptions. Habit almost, if
not quite, disables us from thinking of appearance except as something seen;
and though phenomenon has a more generalized meaning, yet we cannot rid it
of associations with appearance. When, therefore, Philosophy proves that
our knowledge of the external world can be but phenomenal -- when it concludes
that the things of which we are conscious are appearances; it inevitably
suggests an illusiveness like that to which our visual perceptions are so
liable. Good pictures show us that the aspects of things may be very nearly
simulated by colours on canvas. The looking-glass distinctly proves how deceptive
is sight when unverified by touch; as does also the apparent bend in a straight
stick inclined in the water. And the cases in which we think we see something
which we do not see, further shake our faith in vision. So that the implication
of uncertainty has infected the very word appearance. Hence, Philosophy,
by giving it an extended meaning, leads us to think of all our senses as
deceiving us in the same way that our eyes do; and so makes us feel ourselves
in a world of phantasms. Had phenomenon and appearance no such misleading
associations, little, if any, of this mental confusion would result. Or if,
when discussing the nature of our knowledge, we always thought of tactual
impressions instead of visual impressions -- if instead of the perceptions
of objects yielded by our eyes we always insisted upon thinking of the perceptions
yielded by our hands, the idea of unreality would in large measure disappear.
Metaphysical criticism would then have merely the effect of proving to us
that feelings of touch and pressure produced by an object give us no knowledge
of its nature, at the same time that the criticism would by implication admit
that there was a something which produced these feelings. It would prove
to us that our knowledge consists simply of the effects wrought on our consciousness,
and that the causes of those effects remain unknown; but it would not in
doing this tend in any degree to disprove the existence of such causes: all
its arguments tacitly taking them for granted. And when the two were always
thought of in this immediate relation, there would be little danger of falling
into the insanities of idealism.




Such danger as might remain, would disappear on making a further verbal
correction. We increase the seeming unreality of that phenomenal existence
which we can alone know; by contrasting it with a noumenal existence which
we imagine would, if we could know it, be more truly real to us. But we delude
ourselves with a verbal fiction. What is the meaning of the word real? In
the interpretation given to it, the discussions of philosophy retain one
element of the vulgar conception of things while they reject the rest, and
create confusion by the inconsistency. The peasant, on contemplating an object,
does not regard that which he is conscious of as something in himself, but
believes it to be the external object itself: to him the appearance and the
reality are one and the same thing. The metaphysician, however, while his
words imply belief in a reality sees that consciousness cannot embrace it,
but only the appearance of it; and so he transfers the appearance into consciousness
and leaves the reality outside. This reality left outside, he continues to
think of much in the same way that the peasant thinks of the appearance.
The realness ascribed to it is constantly spoken of as though it were known
apart from all acts of consciousness. It seems to be forgotten that the idea
of reality can be nothing more than some mode of consciousness; and that
the question to be considered is -- What is the relation between this mode
and other modes?




By reality we mean persistence in consciousness: a persistence which is
either unconditional, as our consciousness of space, or which is conditional,
as our consciousness of a body while grasping it. The real, as we conceive
it, is distinguished solely by the test of persistence; for by this test
we separate it from what we call the unreal. Between a person standing before
us and the idea of such a person, we discriminate by our ability to expel
the idea from consciousness and our inability, while looking at him, to expel
the person from consciousness. And when in doubt as to the trustworthiness
of some impression made on our eyes in the dusk, we settle the matter by
observing whether the impression persists on closer inspection; and we predicate
reality if the persistence is complete. How truly persistence is what we
mean by reality, is shown in the fact that when, after criticism has proved
that the real as presented in perception is not the objectively real, the
vague consciousness which we retain of the objectively real, is of something
which persists absolutely, under all changes of mode, form, or appearance.
And the fact that we cannot form even an indefinite notion of the absolutely
real, except as the absolutely persistent, implies that persistence is our
ultimate test of the real whether as existing under its unknown form or under
the form known to us.




Consequently, the result must be the same to us whether that which we
perceive be the Unknowable itself, or an effect invariably wrought on us
by the Unknowable. If, under certain conditions furnished by our constitutions,
some Power of which the nature is beyond conception, always produces a certain
mode of consciousness -- if this mode of consciousness is as persistent as
wou