The object of all systems of philosophy is to comprehend and teach the truth about the world around us, especially that part supposed to exist beyond the range of our senses, and to prescribe what is right and good in the life of man.
In modern times the attempt to unite all the sciences into a general system has been made by August Comte in France, and Herbert Spencer in England. According to Comte, it was time wasted and labor lost to attempt to explain the cause of gravity, chemical affinity, and electric and magnetic attraction and repulsion.
The atomic theory of the constitution of matter, the conception of an interstellar ether, the undulatory theory of light and heat were all cast aside as useless and unworthy of notice because they were not directly observable and the senses unaided could not apprehend them.
According to Comte, the only object of science and philosophy is to observe, record and classify sensible phenomena. What could not be observed by the senses could not be known and did not exist. It is said the only open road to the advance of philosophy was thus forbidden by the man who made the first valuable contribution to its advancement.
Herbert Spencer first undertook the great task of discovering the unifying principle of nature. He recognized all possible phenomena as parts of one great whole, and held that all were united by natural law. He differed from Comte in that he recognized the imperceptible as a reality, but made no attempt to explain it or to bring it into harmony with the phenomena of sense, but designated it the unknowable. He divided his system into two general divisions—the knowable, which includes all things of sense, experience, and the unknowable, which includes everything else, or the invisible and imperceptible.
He held the knowable is the proper sphere of man's knowledge or philosophy, and the unknowable the legitimate domain of God and religion. And while he held that God and religion were imperceptible and unknowable, he held they were none the less a truth of the highest degree of certainty. It is therefore well said that all who fear the downfall of religion as a result of the encroachments of science or philosophy may thank Herbert Spencer for placing it where neither science or philosophy can touch it.
Upon the law of relativity he places the basis of that which can be known, and that which cannot be known. He says: "We think in relations. This is truly the form of all thought.... On analyzing the process of thought we found that cognition of the absolute—the unknowable—was impossible because it presents neither relations nor its elements—difference and likeness. Further we found that not only intelligence but life itself consists in the establishment of internal relations in correspondence with external relations. And lastly, it was shown by the relativity of our thought we are eternally debarred from knowing or conceiving absolute being, yet that this relativity of our thought necessitates that vague consciousness of Absolute Being which no mental effort can suppress."
It is apparent that these propositions contradict each other. For, if from the relativity of thought we are eternally debarred from knowing or conceiving Absolute Being, how is it that we have a vague consciousness of this same Absolute Being which cannot be suppressed? Consciousness is one form of knowledge. Spencer, thus recognizing the reality of the unknowable, regards that which is or can be known as different manifestations of the unknowable.
These manifestations he claims, as they appear in consciousness, pass through a double series. First, a vivid series which includes all sense experience, and second, a faint series which includes thought, as in speculation and deliberation. Force, he contends, is the ultimate and deepest truth of the universe. All forms of consciousness, he says, are derived as experiences of force. All sense experiences as in the objective series, all subjective feeling or thought, everything known or knowable, is a manifestation of the one universal force or energy. This universal force, I contend, is, first, spirit or mind force; second, electric force controlled by mind force.
He says: "Contemplating pure force, we are irresistibly compelled by the relativity of our thought to vaguely conceive some unknown force as the correlative of the known force." This unknown or imperceptible force I contend is electricity and the mental force back of it. All our ideas of matter and motion, he says, are ideas of force. The demonstrated fact of the indestructibility of matter is but another name for the indestructibility of force.