VII.
The most remarkable thing in the whole search for truth, is that anybody after Hume should have attempted to find it with Hume’s principles. Yet the two best known writers who have lived in England since Hume’s day, have rested their dogmatic doctrines on the foundations laid by the sensational philosophers. Hume’s impressions and ideas became John Stuart Mill’s permanent possibilities of sensation and feeling, and Herbert Spencer’s vivid and faint manifestations of the unknowable. In our time Herbert Spencer has undertaken the herculean task of explaining matter and mind, time and space, society and morals; of showing what they are and what they are not, by the same principles which Hume himself demonstrated to be incapable of explaining anything. Spencer’s units of knowledge are vivid and faint manifestations of the Unknown. How the unknowable remains unknown, after vividly and faintly manifesting itself, we are not told. Mr. Spencer’s vivid and faint manifestations of the unknown are old acquaintances with new names.
Locke knew them as impressions and sensations. Berkeley recognized them as ideas of sense and imagination. John Stuart Mill was on speaking terms with them as permanent possibilities of sensation and feeling. Mr. Spencer gives them another baptism and another name. He calls them vivid and faint manifestations of the unknowable. While they have been changed in name, however, it must not be supposed that they have undergone any change in nature or character. They stand apart, the one from the other, just the same as ever. They are just as foreign to the mind, where they vividly and faintly manifest themselves, as were the impressions of John Locke. They flare and flicker, rise and fall, like the jack-o’-lantern lights of legend and tale. One light is not of a piece with any other light. The lights follow one another in such quick succession, first vivid, then faint, that one cannot tell from the momentary flames and flashes what is intended to be advertised. That something is trying, by various pyrotechnic displays, to get itself revealed seems to be evident. But there is such hurry on the part of the something that makes the manifestations, such a disorderly whirl and changing of lights, that the observer is totally bewildered; and, being under the necessity of making some account to himself as to their meaning, concludes that they are vivid and faint illuminations of the unknowable. Hume’s procession of sensations and ideas has by Spencer been converted into the fire-works of the unknowable. With Hume’s physiological theory, the mind could know nothing but its own sensations. Spencer’s vivid and faint manifestations of the unknowable are equally as incapable of furnishing any rational basis for belief in mind or matter, law or cause, self or God. To ask the human mind to believe the encyclopedic, dogmatic system of philosophy he addressed to it, after insisting that all our knowledge is but the sum of vivid and faint manifestations of the unknowable, is as irrational as trying to build a cathedral on a London fog bank. Underneath every one of Spencer’s general terms, the indestructibility of matter, the continuity of motion, the persistence of force, there is nothing but sensations, vivid or faint manifestations of the unknown.
“The doctrine of the indestructibility of matter,” he says, “has now become a commonplace.” “Matter never either comes into existence, or ceases to exist.” How are we to know this, with minds incapable of any other knowledge except such as is made up of vivid and faint manifestations of the unknown? Who ever had a sensation or a manifestation of the indestructibility of matter? This is an idea involving all past time and all future time, and all the laws and forces by which matter is regulated and conserved. How could an image of the indestructibility of matter be photographed on the sensitive plate of the mind? To do this it would be necessary to compress all past time and all future time into one moment, and all matter into one single square inch or square yard of space, so that the impression of it could be made. To believe in the indestructibility of matter, with Mr. Spencer’s theory of the mind’s capacity to know, is delirium and insanity. It is to believe in something that the mind, by its very nature, cannot even get an impression of. It is believing that the ocean can be carried in a thimble without any bottom. Any man who should utter this publicly, and sincerely, would be put in the insane asylum. He says again, “the very nature of the intelligence negatives the supposition that motion can be conceived (much less known) either to commence or to cease.” The nature of the intelligence is such that all the knowledge it possesses is made up of sensations and manifestations of the unknown. How can the continuity of motion be conceived? To do this, we must have a conception of all past time and all future time. It is an idea as transcendent as the idea of God.
Mr. Spencer claims that the power the universe manifests to us is utterly inscrutable; that space and time are wholly incomprehensible; that matter, in its ultimate nature, is as absolutely incomprehensible as space and time; that all efforts to understand the essential nature of motion do but bring us to alternative absurdities of thought; that it is impossible to form any idea of force in itself, and equally impossible to comprehend either its mode of exercise or its law of variation; that we are unable to believe or to conceive that the duration of consciousness is infinite, and equally unable to know it as finite, or to conceive it as finite; and that the personality of which we are each conscious, and of which the existence is to each a fact beyond all others the most certain, yet is a thing which cannot truthfully be known at all: knowledge of it is forbidden by the very nature of thought. All this is perfectly consistent with his theory of knowledge. This is the point to which David Hume, his master, conducted the human mind in its search for truth. But Spencer is not logical; he had a theory of being that contradicted his theory of knowing. So he reasons first one way and then another. He says, elsewhere in his First Principles, that common sense asserts the existence of a reality; that objective science proves that this reality cannot be what we think it; that subjective science shows why we cannot think of it as it is, and yet are compelled to think of it as existing; and that in this assertion of a reality utterly inscrutable in nature, religion finds an assertion essentially coinciding with her own. That we are compelled to regard every phenomenon as a manifestation of some power by which we are acted upon. That 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. Analyzing the above declarations, we find that Mr. Spencer knows there is an ultimate reality. Then it has being. It acts upon us. Then it has the attribute of action. All phenomena are manifestations of it. Then it has power. All phenomena are manifestations of an inscrutable power, by which we are acted upon. Then it has causal energy. We are unable to think of limits to the presence of this power. Then it is omnipresent. So the unknowable, inscrutable something has being, power, activity, causal energy, and omnipresence. But how are we to grasp these universal, transcendental attributes of the unknowable, with an intelligence incapable of receiving anything but simple, separate, unrelated, broken impressions and manifestations? It takes as much mind to believe in the unknowable, with the attributes of power, activity, being, causal energy, and omnipresence, as to believe in a self-existent God, with the attributes of power, wisdom, justice, truth, and love.
Spencer’s theory of knowing is destructive, while his theory of being is constructive and transcendental.