Herbert Spencer professes to be carrying out, a step farther, the doctrine put into shape by Hamilton and Mansel, viz., "the philosophy of the Unconditioned." In other words, he carries that doctrine forward to its rigidly logical consequences, and utters the last word which Hamilton and Mansel dare not utter--"Apprehensible by us there is no God." The Ultimate Reality is absolutely unknown; it can not be apprehended by the human intellect, and it can not present itself to the intellect at all. This Ultimate Reality can not be intelligent, because to think is to condition, and the Absolute is the unconditioned; can not be conscious, because all consciousness is of plurality and difference, and the Absolute is one; can not be personal, because personality is determination or limitation, and the Infinite is the illimitable. It is "audacious," "irreverent," "impious," to apply any of these predicates to it; to regard it as Mind, or speak of it as Righteous. [327] The ultimate goal of the philosophy of the Unconditioned is a purely subjective Atheism.
And yet of this Primary Existence--inscrutable, and absolutely unknown--Spencer knows something; knows as much as he pleases to know. He knows that this "ultimate of ultimates is Force," [328] an "Omnipresent Power," [329] is "One" and "Eternal." [330] He knows also that it can not be intelligent, self-conscious, and a personality. [331] This is a great deal to affirm and deny of an existence "absolutely unknown." May we not be permitted to affirm of this hidden and unknown something that it is conscious Mind, especially as Mind is admitted to be the only analogon of Power; and "the force by which we produce change, and which serves to symbolize the causes of changes in general, is the final disclosure of analysis." [332]
[Footnote 327: ][ (return) ] "First Principles," pp. 111, 112.
[Footnote 328: ][ (return) ] "First Principles," p. 235.
[Footnote 329: ][ (return) ] Ibid., p. 99.
[Footnote 330: ][ (return) ] Ibid., p. 81.
[Footnote 331: ][ (return) ] Ibid., pp. 108-112.
[Footnote 332: ][ (return) ] Ibid., p. 235.
3. We advance to the review of the third fundamental principle of Hamilton's philosophy of the Unconditioned, viz., that the terms infinite and absolute are names for a "mere negation of thought"--a "mental impotence" to think, or, in other words, the absence of all the conditions under which thought is possible.
This principle is based upon a distinction between "positive" and "negative" thought, which is made with an air of wonderful precision and accuracy in "the Alphabet of Human Thought." [333] "Thinking is positive when existence is predicated of an object." "Thinking is negative when existence is not attributed to an object." "Negative thinking," therefore, is not the thinking of an object as devoid of this or that particular attribute, but as devoid of all attributes, and thus of all existence; that is, it is "the negation of all thought"--nothing. "When we think a thing, that is done by conceiving it as possessed of certain modes of being or qualities, and the sum of these qualities constitutes its concept or notion." "When we perform an act of negative thought, this is done by thinking something as not existing in this or that determinate mode; and when we think it as existing in no determinate mode, we cease to think at all--it becomes a nothing." [334] Now the Infinite, according to Hamilton, can not be thought in any determinate mode; therefore we do not think it at all, and therefore it is for us "a logical Non-entity."