3. Schelling Conceptions: Born in Wurtemburg, 1775; died 1854. The philosopher of "identity"—i. e., he identifies subject and object as one. Schelling is best understood by being placed in contrast with Fichte. I quote from Maurice: "Fichte, combining the enthusiasm of the French revolution with a cordial acceptance of the lessons he had learned in Konigsberg, was, from the beginning of his life to the end of it, asking what was needful to make him a free man—to enable him to do the work which he had to do—to be what he was meant to be. He was sure that he could find the answer to that question. He said boldly that neither he nor any man could find the answer to any other. What was not himself he must leave. It sounded like atheistical doctrine. People said it was atheistical doctrine. But in demanding what was needful to make him true, he found that he needed a true God. His rivals charged him with inconsistency. He had taken into his doctrine that which did not belong to it—he was borrowing from them. That did not signify. He must have what he required. That was his consistency. He was happy, not only in the nobleness of his life, but in the opportunity of his death. He died just as his country became free—before it was again reduced into slavery by monarchs and system-mongers. Schelling was the thinker who most denounced Fichte's methods and Fichte's departures from his own maxims. For he had been led to feel profoundly the worth of that which Fichte ignored—the worth of a method which he [Fichte] thought impossible. He [Schelling] could not start from that which he is, or thinks, or knows, or believes. He could not forget that a whole world is presented to us. He must proceed from that which is given; he must see how that affects the man, meets the demands of man, prevents him from losing himself in himself. He must have a nature-philosophy. That Schelling thinks, will include all things, be the end of all things. Is not that atheism? cry his opponents. Is not Nature taking the place of God? He replies to them vehemently, contemptuously. He does not want to make all the shifting forms of nature into God. There is a Being working through these, working behind them. To know that Being is what man requires. He must have an object for all his search. That Object cannot only be an Object. It must be a subject—thinking as well as thought of. In that confession of a Subject-Object is a depth which a Nature-philosophy might disclose, but which it could not contain. It must, as some of Schelling's critics said—at first exciting only his scorn by the remark—lie beyond the bounds of philosophy; it must be that which philosophy asks for. Perhaps Schelling may have discovered afterwards, or partly discovered, that they were right. If he did, it was by faithfully pursuing his inquiry as far as it would go, by holding fast to the thought that man's first demand is for a revelation of something. If of a Subject-Object, perhaps 'something' does not exactly meet the demand; perhaps the thing will not be able to reveal itself, or to make persons know what is revealed. We are not careful to inquire what the conclusions were at which Schelling ultimately arrived. He often angrily discouraged the attempts of his disciples and of his opponents to explain those conclusions; not unnaturally or unreasonably, it seems to us, if he felt that the explanations were to be fitted into a compact system, and if he knew that what he had done, supposing he had done anything, was to point to that which is, or to Him Who is, above all systems—to the only ground, as well as the only end, of knowledge.
"It is clear, at all events, that we are once more in that ocean of Being, which our guides of the eighteenth century were so anxious that we should avoid. Being and Not Being, Being and Becoming, are, as in the days of Plato, the watchwords which will be rung in our ears; to which we may shut our ears if we please, but which will encounter us when we least expect them." (Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy—Maurice—Vol. II, pp. 655-6).
"God" for Schelling, says Elmendorf, "is the absolute indifference of contraries; the unity of being and thought, of subject and object, of ideal and real; this is the potentiality of the actual from which the two opposites differentiate themselves without losing their unity in the absolute." (History of Philosophy, p. 257).
4. Herbert Spencer: God unknown, and unknowable, would be the description of Spencer's conception of the "Absolute Being." "Spencer's primary doctrine is evolution, both in psychical and physical phenomenon"; evolution he describes as a change from 'an indefinite, incoherent homogeneity, to a definite coherent heterogeneity.'" "This principle is an induction from experience, of which no further account can be given, for the absolute in any form is unthinkable, although there is an ultimate reality in which subject and object coincide; yet our concept of the Absolute is positive though indefinite." (Elmendorf).
Spencer's own declarations of our inability to know the "unknowable," is as follows:
"Every religion, setting out, though it does, with the tacit assertion of a mystery; and so asserts that it is not a mystery passing human comprehension. But an examination of the solutions they severally propound, shows them to be uniformly invalid. The analysis of every possible hypothesis proves, not simply that no hypothesis is sufficient, but that no hypothesis is even thinkable. And thus the mystery which all religions recognize, turns out to be a far more transcendent mystery than any of them suspect—not a relative, but an absolute mystery.
"Here, then, is an ultimate religious truth of the highest possible certainty—a truth in which religions in general are at one with each other, and with a philosophy antagonistic to their special dogmas. And this truth, respecting which there is a latent agreement among all mankind, from the fetish-worshipper to the most stoical critic of human creeds, must be the one we seek. 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 utterly inscrutable." (First Principles, pp. 47-48).
On this passage from Spencer, Leighton justly remarks:
"This, certainly is a species of knowledge unique in kind. How can we know that we can know absolutely nothing about a conceivable object of knowledge? Mr. Spencer's knowledge of the unknowability of the ultimate reality is, so far as it goes, very positive. And, furthermore he knows that the Unknowable is a Power, "an infinite and Eternal Energy from which all things proceed. The certainty that such a power exists, while, on the other hand, its nature transcends intuition, is the certainty towards which intelligence has from the first been progressing. Furthermore, we know the modes in which this inscrutable Power manifests itself. 'The Power manifested throughout the universe distinguished as material, is the same Power, which in ourselves, wells up under the form of consciousness.' (Principles of Sociology, 3, p. 174). "Notwithstanding the antinomies which Mr. Spencer finds to be involved in thinking 'Infinite' and 'Eternal' and notwithstanding that the deepest nescience is the goal of human thought, he confidently asserts that 'amid the mysteries which become the more mysterious the more they are thought about, there will remain (to man) the one absolute certainty, that he is ever in the presence of an Infinite and Eternal Energy, from which all things proceed.'
"The positiveness of this conclusion, when compared with Mr. Spencer's declaration of the impotence of knowledge when it is confronted with ontological problems, is sufficient of itself to awaken doubts as to the legitimacy of his procedure." (Modern Conceptions of God, pp. 104-105).