HAS SPENCER’S DOCTRINE OF INCONCEIVABILITY DRIVEN RELIGION INTO THE UNKNOWABLE?
BY REV. T. ERNEST ALLEN.
The service rendered to humanity by Mr. Herbert Spencer in the elaboration of the Synthetic Philosophy, should command the admiration and gratitude of all broad-minded men. There are certain fallacies in the argument by which Religion is relegated into the “Unknowable,” however, to which it will be the purpose of this essay to call the reader’s attention. If Religion really be, by its very nature, unknowable, it follows that as man grows in intelligence, the extent to which it occupies his thought will tend to diminish towards final extinction. It is a thoroughly wholesome state of affairs that, like all things which claim our consideration, Religion should again and again be compelled to step into the arena to vindicate its right to hold sway over humanity. Nor is the attitude of many minds which places Religion upon the defensive, unreasonable, or the outgrowth of a perverse spirit, but, on the contrary, it results from the questionings of those eager to find the truth and anxious to “prove all things” and cast error aside. Let us see if Religion can withstand the fierce onslaught, threatening its very life, which Mr. Spencer makes in his “First Principles” (pp. 3-123).
Our author’s first attempt is to “form something like a general theory of current opinions,” so as neither to “over-estimate nor under-estimate their worth.” As a special case from the examination of which he hopes to derive a general method, he traces the evolution of government from the beginning until now. It is held that no belief concerning government is wholly true or false; “each of them insists upon a certain subordination of individual actions to social requirements…. From the oldest and rudest idea of allegiance, down to the most advanced political theory of our own day, there is on this point complete unanimity.” He speaks of this subordination as a postulate “which is, indeed, of self-evident validity,” as ranking “next in certainty to the postulates of exact science.” As the result of his search for “a generalization which may habitually guide us when seeking for the soul of truth in things erroneous,” he concludes: “This method is to compare all opinions of the same genus; to set aside as more or less discrediting one another those various special and concrete elements in which such opinions disagree; to observe what remains after the discordant constituents have been eliminated, and to find for the remaining constituent that abstract expression which holds true throughout its divergent modifications.”
What did Mr. Spencer discover by the application of his method to government? A postulate which he announces to be of “self-evident validity,” an “unquestionable fact”—that is all! His method is a statement of the process of abstraction. Very useful though it is in determining what one or more predicates may be affirmed of many objects of thought which differ widely otherwise or in revealing truths, as he points out, respecting which men can by no possibility disagree, it cannot assist us in discriminating between true and false “discordant constituents,” for which purpose a simple method would be helpful. Certainly this is not the method which gave us the most “advanced political theory” of the day! The fact is, that when used, as Mr. Spencer suggests, it shrivels the total content of any subject under consideration, down to the one truth lying at the foundation of the most primitive theory. In the case of Religion, he alleges that the one point upon which there is entire unanimity between the most divergent creeds, between the lowest fetichism and the most enlightened Christianity, is this: “That there is something to be explained.” An interesting piece of information, surely! Yes, but “the Power which the Universe manifests to us is utterly inscrutable.” Over against this, we have the magnificent superstructure of modern Science, erected by the employment of methods quite other than the one which he esteems competent to overthrow Religion.
The postulate, a straight line may be drawn between two points, while it makes a geometry possible, reveals nothing as to the properties of lines; so, in the present case, the proposition resulting from the process of abstraction, “there is something to be explained,” affirms that, at least à priori, Religion is possible, but decides nothing as to the truth or falsity of unnumbered statements which millions of people have believed for centuries to belong to the domain of Religion. This method does not and cannot discredit Religion.
“Religious ideas of one kind or another,” says Mr. Spencer, “are almost universal…. 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…. Considering all faculties,” under the evolutionary hypothesis, “to result from 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 feeling in question, and so are obliged to admit that it is as normal as any other faculty…. We are also forced to infer that this feeling is in some way conducive to human welfare…. Positive knowledge does not and never can fill the whole region of possible thought. At the utmost reach of discovery there arises, and must ever arise, the question—what lies beyond?… 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 is that which passes the sphere of experience.” Religion is “a constituent of the great whole; and being such must be treated as a subject of Science with no more prejudice than any other reality.”
It will suit our present purpose to divide the cognitive faculties into intuitive and non-intuitive. If I rightly understand Mr. Spencer, when he says of the subject matter of Religion that it “passes the sphere of experience,” he means that the content of Religion results from the action of the non-intuitive faculties upon material furnished by the intuitive faculties, and not from the immediate action of the latter upon environment. For the sake of the argument, I will grant this position. In order that mankind may build up sciences in which it reposes such confidence, the action of the non-intuitive faculties must be trusted, for it is only through such action that sciences can ever be constructed from the materials of experience. Granting, then, the general trustworthiness of mental operations, the mind cannot abstract out of human experiences what was not already in them; cannot evolve what was not involved. The separation of the true from the false in Religion, then, must be accomplished, as in the case of Science, by verifying the intuitions and going repeatedly over the chains of reasoning which lead to the conclusions farthest removed from intuitions, to guard as much as possible against error. Thus, because drawn out from given data, certain conclusions will embody to-day what is true in Religion, and later, with an enlarged experience, more or less modified conclusions will express what will then be seen to be true. This is in accord with the general law of evolution which holds for Science. From the present point of view, Mr. Spencer seems to concur in the above, since he says of religious ideas, that “to suppose these multiform conceptions” to “be one and all absolutely groundless, discredits too profoundly that average human intelligence from which all our individual intelligences are inherited.”
To the statement that the mind cannot abstract out of human experiences what was not already in them, Mr. Spencer could make, I think, but one answer, to wit: that while the operations of the mind are generally reliable, and while there has been an element in human experience which seemed to warrant conclusions derived from them, nevertheless, mankind has egregiously erred in thinking that it had the power to build up a valid content to Religion, since the very nature of Religion is such, that the mental operations which are reliable in the realm of Science cannot be so in the realm of Religion. To answer this, we must consider the argument for conceivability as the touchstone which is to separate the “Knowable” from the “Unknowable.” Corresponding to small objects, a piece of rock for example, where the sides, top, and bottom can be considered as practically all present in consciousness at once, and large ones, like the earth, where they cannot, our author divides conceptions into complete and symbolic. Great magnitudes and classes of objects also produce symbolic conceptions which, while indispensable to reasoning, often lead us into error. “We habitually mistake our symbolic conceptions for real ones.” The former “are legitimate, provided that by some cumulative or indirect process of thought, or by the fulfilment of predictions based upon them, we can assure ourselves that they stand for actualities,” otherwise “they are altogether vicious and illusive” and “illegitimate” and here belong religious ideas.
The foregoing is applied by Mr. Spencer in his argument relative to the origin of the Universe respecting which, he asserts that “three verbally intelligible suppositions may be made”: (1) that it is self-existent, (2) that it was self-created, (3) that it was created by an external agency. “Which of these suppositions is most credible it is not needful here to enquire. The deeper question, into which this finally merges, is, whether any one of these is even conceivable in the true sense of the word.” He shows that, since the mind refuses to accept the transformation of absolute vacuity into the existent, the theory of self-creation forces us back to a potential Universe whose self-creation was transition to an actual Universe, and that then, we must explain the existence of the potential Universe and that, similarly, creation by an external agency demands that we account for the genesis of the Creator, so that both of these theories involve the self-existence of a something. Therefore, I shall analyze his presentation of the first theory only. “Self-existence 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 in any sense be an explanation of the Universe…. It is not a question of probability, or credibility, but of conceivability.”
In making conceivability the supreme test as to what is knowable, Mr. Spencer sets up a criterion which he himself violates. If it can be shown that he places at the very foundation of Science a postulate or, what is generally conceded to be a demonstrated truth, which, equally with the conception of the Universe as self-existent, involves the conception of infinite past-time, it is evident that we shall have broken down the fundamental distinguishing characteristic which separates his “Knowable” from his “Unknowable,” and thus leave Science and Religion standing upon the same level of validity in their relation to the human mind. In the second part of “First Principles,” which treats of the “Knowable,” Mr. Spencer says (p. 180): “The Indestructibility of Matter … is a proposition on the truth of which depends the possibility of exact Science. Could it be shown, or could it with any rationality be even supposed, that Matter, either in its aggregates or in its units, ever became non-existent, there would be need either to ascertain under what conditions it became non-existent, or else to confess that Science and Philosophy are impossible. For if, instead of having to deal with fixed quantities and weights, we had to deal with quantities and weights which were apt, wholly or in part, to be annihilated, there would be introduced an incalculable element, fatal to all positive conclusions” (p. 172). Considering that in times past men have believed in the creation of Matter out of nothing and in its annihilation, he points out that it is to quantitative Chemistry that we owe the empirical basis for our present belief.
Next he inquires “whether we have any higher warrant for this fundamental belief than the warrant of conscious induction,” and writes as follows of logical necessity (pp. 172-179): “The consciousness of logical necessity, is the consciousness that a certain conclusion is implicitly contained in certain premises explicitly stated. If, contrasting a young child and an adult, we see that this consciousness of logical necessity, absent from the one is present in the other, we are taught that there is a growing up to the recognition of certain necessary truths, merely by the unfolding of the inherited intellectual forms and faculties. To state the case more specifically:—before a truth can be known as necessary, two conditions must be fulfilled. There must be a mental structure capable of grasping the terms of the proposition and the relation alleged between them; and there must be such definite and deliberate mental representation of these terms as makes possible a clear consciousness of this relation…. Along with acquirement of more complex faculty and more vivid imagination, there comes a power of perceiving to be necessary truths, what were before not recognized as truths at all…. All this which holds of logical and mathematical truths, holds, with change of terms, of physical truths. There are necessary truths in Physics for the apprehension of which, also, a developed and disciplined intelligence is required; and before such intelligence arises, not only may there be failure to apprehend the necessity of them, but there may be vague beliefs in their contraries…. But though many are incapable of grasping physical axioms, it no more follows that physical axioms are not knowable à priori by a developed intelligence, than it follows that logical relations are not necessary, because undeveloped intellects cannot perceive their necessity.
“The terms ‘à priori truth’ and ‘necessary truth’ … are to be interpreted,” he continues, “not in the old sense, as implying cognitions wholly independent of experiences, but as implying cognitions that have been rendered organic by immense accumulations of experiences, received partly by the individual, but mainly by all ancestral individuals whose nervous systems he inherits. But when during mental evolution, the vague ideas arising in a nervous structure imperfectly organized, are replaced by clear ideas arising in a definite nervous structure; this definite structure, molded by experience into correspondence with external phenomena, makes necessary in thought the relations answering to absolute uniformities in things. Hence, among others, the conception of the Indestructibility of Matter…. Our inability to conceive Matter becoming non-existent, is immediately consequent upon the nature of thought…. It must be added, that no experimental verification of the truth that Matter is indestructible, is possible without a tacit assumption of it. For all such verification implies weighing, and weighing implies that the matter forming the weight remains the same. In other words, the proof that certain matter dealt with in certain ways is unchanged in quantity, depends on the assumption that other matter otherwise dealt with is unchanged in quantity.”
In answer to the above it can be said:—
First. The current explanation of the existence of Matter is that it was created by an external agency. Mr. Spencer’s lucid statement of the way in which Matter has been proved indestructible does not go far enough. Where he stops, logic might justly pronounce the whole procedure a fallacious one, a begging of the whole question at issue. The binding force of the whole argument rests upon a rational principle here overlooked by Mr. Spencer, the principle of sufficient cause. The chemist in making the experiment found that certain substances counterbalanced a given weight; after combustion, the products counterbalanced the same weight. If the weight did not change during the experiment, then no matter had been destroyed. The weight is believed not to have changed, because it existed under ordinary and quiescent conditions: which, in view of past race experience, rendered it extremely improbable that any force sufficient to vitiate the result had come into play during the experiment. The absence of a sufficient cause to change the weight, is, then, the critical point of the argument, and the perfect trust of the mind in the principle of sufficient cause forces us to the conclusion that Matter is indestructible.
What has really been accomplished, however, by the experiment? I do not object to the statement that Matter is indestructible, but the meaning of this explicitly stated, is that in the light of the present knowledge of the race, we have experimented with Matter under certain extreme conditions—some chemical changes seeming, at first glance, to annihilate it—and have not been able to destroy it, therefore, Matter is indestructible. While this is true to an extent which preserves the integrity of the foundation for our Science and our Philosophy, it is at the same time consistent with the hypothesis that a Being surpassing man in intelligence and power, may be able to convert Matter into a not-matter—from the standpoint of present definitions of Matter and Space—quantitatively correlated with it, or vice versa; and this statement of the case harmonizes Science and Religion. Now, what from the point of view of Science Mr. Spencer accepts as indestructibility, is identical with what Religion means when it affirms self-existence, and as he has demonstrated to his own satisfaction that self-existence in the abstract is an illegitimate conception, a conception of what by its very nature is unknowable, because it involves the impossible conception of infinite past-time, he is logically bound by accepting one horn of the dilemma, to admit the conception of self-existence into the realm of the Knowable, or by choosing the other, to transfer his “Indestructibility,” his “possibility of exact Science” into the realm of the Unknowable! In either event, we place an ultimate religious idea and a scientific conception whose denial he admits to be the annihilation of exact Science, upon the same footing, and so reduce the distinguishing characteristic which he has set up to differentiate the Knowable from the Unknowable, to zero.
Second. We come now to the statement of some of the consequences which follow from Mr. Spencer’s view—already explained—as to how the higher warrant, by which we know the Indestructibility of Matter to be an axiom, a self-evident truth, originated. In his chapter upon “Ultimate Scientific Ideas” he says that Space and Time are “wholly incomprehensible,” and that “Matter … in its ultimate nature, is as absolutely incomprehensible as Space and Time.” He affirms, as pointed out, that no experimental verification is possible without assuming what we set out to prove. If the chemical balance cannot demonstrate this truth, how, then, can we know it? It is, we are told, an à priori or necessary truth which arises in our consciousness through the “cognitions that have been rendered organic by immense accumulations of experiences, received partly by the individual, but mainly by all ancestral individuals whose nervous systems” we inherit. This is Mr. Spencer’s answer. This commits us to the absurdity, that the truth of the doctrine of the Indestructibility of Matter has come to be accepted as axiomatic by the repetition of cognitions of an inconceivable “absolute uniformity” of things, by an indefinite series of ancestors, in the face of the fact that the present development of Science does not now permit us, with the aid of all its apparatus, to receive a single logically valid cognition from the same phenomenal world which supplied all the others; ergo, add together a sufficient number of cognitions of the inconceivable, and you arrive at an axiomatic truth! To lift a ton weight, apply a vast number of forces of one ounce intensity, acting successively in time, and the thing is done!
Mr. Spencer cannot point out the characteristics which separate those inconceivable things and qualities which may legitimately furnish the raw material for the development of axioms, from those which cannot, since this would at once remove them to the category of the conceivable, and he cannot exhaustively catalogue the axioms, since the process of evolution which he puts forth as the sole and sufficient explanation of their origin and growth is still going on. We therefore see that we are justified in saying that conceivability is worthless as a test as to whether an object of thought lies within the domain of the Knowable or Unknowable. Further, should a theologian say to Mr. Spencer “To me, the existence of God and his Infinite Love, Wisdom, and Power rank as axioms,” I do not see how, consistently with the above, he could deny that these truths were valid to the theologian, even if they were not so to his own mind. How completely we have placed Religion and Science upon the same level is evident from our author’s statement that “a religious creed is definable as a theory of original causation” and from the fact that a self-existent Universe is one of the three possible hypotheses which he mentions in his argument.
Space forbids the criticism of Mr. Spencer’s doctrine of the relativity of knowledge and of the speculations concerning the Infinite and Absolute based upon the writings of Hamilton and Mansel. I have been restricted, also, to the negative side of the question, but so far as inconceivability enters as a factor into the argument against Religion, I contend that it has broken down; that so far as that element affects the problem, Religion has as high credentials as Science.