In the criticisms heretofore made, some points, held in common by the three writers named early in this work, have been, it may be, passed over unnoticed. This was done, because, being held in common, it was believed that an examination of them, as presented by the latest writer, would be most satisfactory. Therefore, what was peculiar in thought or expression to Sir Wm. Hamilton or Mr. Mansel, we have intended to notice when speaking of those writers. But where Mr. Spencer seems to present their very thought as his own, it has appeared better to remark upon it in his latest form of expression. Mr. Spencer also holds views peculiar to himself. These we shall examine in their place. And for convenience' sake, what we have to say will take the form of a running commentary upon those chapters entitled, "Ultimate Religious Ideas," "Ultimate Scientific Ideas," "The Relativity of all Knowledge," and "The Reconciliation." Before entering upon this, however, some general remarks will be pertinent.
1. Like his teachers, Mr. Spencer believes that the Understanding is the highest faculty of the human intellect. This is implied in the following sentence: "Those imbecilities of the understanding that disclose themselves when we try to answer the highest questions of objective science, subjective science proves to be necessitated by the laws of that understanding."—First Principles, p. 98.
His illustrations, also, are all, or nearly all, taken from sensuous objects. In speaking of the Universe, evidently the material Universe is present to his mind. His questions refer to objects of sense, and he shows plainly enough that any attempt to answer them by the Sense or Understanding is futile. Hence he concludes that they cannot be answered. But those who "know of a surety," that man is more than an animal nature, containing a Sense and an Understanding; that he is also a spiritual person, having an Eye, the pure Reason, which can see straight to the central Truth, with a clearness and in a light which dims and pales the noonday sun, know also that, and how, these difficulties, insoluble to the lower faculties, are, in this noble alembic, finally dissolved.
2. As Mr. Spencer follows his teachers in the psychology of man's faculties, so does he also in the use of terms. Like them, he employs only such terms as are pertinent to the Sense and Understanding. So also with them he is at fault, in that he raises questions which no Sense or Understanding could suggest even, questions whose very presence are decisive that a Pure Reason is organic in man; and then is guilty of applying to them terms entirely impertinent,—terms belonging only to those lower tribunals before which these questions can never come. For instance, he always employs the word "conceive" to express the effort of the mind in presenting to itself the subjects now under discussion. In some form of noun, verb, or adjective, this word seems to have rained upon his pages; while such terms as "infinite period," "infinitely divisible," "absolutely incompressible," "infinitesimal," and the like, dot them repeatedly. Let us revert, then, a moment to the positions attained in an earlier portion of this work. It was there found that the word conceive was utterly irrelevant to any subject except to objects of Sense and the Understanding in its work of classifying them, or generalizing from them, so, also, with regard to the other terms quoted, it was found that they not only presented no object of thought to the mind, but that the words had no relation to each other, and could not properly be used together. For instance, infinite has no more relation to, and can no more qualify period, than the points of the compass are pertinent to, and can qualify the affections. The phrase, infinite period, is simply absurd, and so also are the others. The words infinite and absolute have nothing to do with amount of any sort. They can be pertinent only to God and his a priori ideas. Many, perhaps most of the criticisms in detail we shall have to make, will be based on this single misuse of words; which yet grows naturally out of that denial and perversion of faculties which Mr. Spencer, in common with the other Limitist writers, has attempted. On the other hand, it is to be remembered, that, if we arrive at the truth at all, we must intuit it; we must either see it as a simple a priori idea, or as a logical deduction from such ideas.
3. A third, and graver error on Mr. Spencer's part is, that he goes on propounding his questions, and asserting that they are insoluble, apparently as unconscious as a sleeper in an enchanted castle that they have all been solved, or at least that the principles on which it would seem that they could be solved have been stated by a man of no mean ability,—Dr. Hickok,—and that until the proposed solutions are thoroughly analyzed and shown to be unsound, his own pages are idle. He implies that there is no cognition higher than a conception, when some very respectable writers have named intuitions as incomparably superior. He speaks of the Understanding as if it were without question the highest faculty of man's intellect, when no less a person than Coleridge said it would satisfy his life's labor to have introduced into English thinking the distinction between the Understanding, as "the faculty judging according to sense," and the Reason, as "the power of universal and necessary convictions," which, being such, must necessarily rank far above the other. And finally he uses the words and phrases above disallowed, and the faculties to which they belong, in an attempt to prove, by the citation of a few items in an experience, what had already been demonstrated by another in a process of as pure reasoning as Calculus. No one, it is believed, can master the volume heretofore alluded to, entitled "Rational Psychology," and so appreciate the demonstration therein contained, of the utter incompetency of the Sense or Understanding to solve such questions as Mr. Spencer has raised by his incident of the partridge, (p. 69,) and the utter irrelevancy to them of the efforts of those faculties, without feeling how tame and unsatisfactory in comparison is the evidence drawn from a few facts in a sensuous experience. One cares not to see a half dozen proofs, more or less that a theory is fallacious who has learned that, and why, the theory cannot be true. Let us now take up in order the chapters heretofore mentioned.
"ULTIMATE RELIGIOUS IDEAS."
The summing up of certain reflections with which this chapter opens, concludes thus: "But that when our symbolic conceptions are such that no cumulative or indirect processes of thought can enable us to ascertain that there are corresponding actualities, nor any predictions be made whose fulfilment can prove this, then they are altogether vicious and illusive, and in no way distinguishable from pure fictions,"—p. 29. So far very good; but his use of it is utterly unsound. "And now to consider the bearings of this general truth on our immediate topic—Ultimate Religious Ideas." But this "general truth" has no bearings upon "ultimate religious ideas"; how then can you consider them? No ideas, and most of all religious ideas, are conceptions, or the results of conceptions—or are the products of "cumulative or indirect processes of thought." They are not results or products at all. They are organic, are the spontaneous presentation of what is inborn, and so must be directly seen to be known at all. Man might pile up "cumulative processes of thought" for unnumbered ages, and might form most exact conceptions of objects of Sense,—conceptions are not possible of others,—and he could never creep up to the least and faintest religious idea.
On the next page, speaking of "suppositions respecting the origin of the Universe," Mr. Spencer says, "The deeper question is, whether any one of them is even conceivable in the true sense of that word. Let us successively test them." This is not necessary. It has already been demonstrated that a conception, or any effort of the Understanding, cannot touch, or have relation to such topics. But it does not follow, therefore, that no one of them is cognizable at all; which he implies. Take the abstract notion of self-existence, for example. No "vague symbolic conceptions," or any conception at all, of it can be formed. A conception is possible only "under relation, difference, and plurality." This is a pure, simple idea, and so can only be known in itself by a seeing—an immediate intuition. It is seen by itself, as out of all relation. It is seen as simple, and so is learned by no difference. It is seen as a unit, and so out of all plurality. The discursive faculty cannot pass over it, because there are in it no various points upon which that faculty may fasten. It may, perhaps, better be expressed by the words pure independence. Again, it is not properly "existence without a beginning," but rather, existence out of all relation to beginning; and so it is an idea, out of all relation to those faculties which are confined to objects that did begin. Because we can "by no mental effort" "form a conception of existence without a beginning," it does not follow that we cannot see that a Being existing out of all relation to beginning is. "To this let us add" that the intuition of such a Being is a complete "explanation of the Universe," and does make it "easier to understand" "that it existed an hour ago, a day ago, a year ago"; for we see that this Being primarily is out of all relation to time, that there is no such thing as an "infinite period," the phrase being absurd; but that through all the procession of events which we call time he is; and that before that procession began—when there was no time, he was. Thus we see that all events are based upon Him who is independent; and that time, in our general use of it, is but the measure of what He produces. We arrive, then, at the conclusion that the Universe is not self-existent, not because self-existence cannot be object to the human mind, and be clearly seen to be an attribute of one Being, but because the Universe is primarily object to faculties in that mind, which cannot entertain such a notion at all; and because this notion is seen to be a necessary idea in the province of that higher faculty which entertains as objects both the idea and the Being to whom it primarily belongs.
The theory that the Universe is self-existent is Pantheism, and not the theory that it is self-created, though this latter, in Mr. Spencer's definition of it, seems only a phase of the other. To say that "self-creation is potential existence passing into actual existence by some inherent necessity," is only to remove self-existence one step farther back, as he himself shows. Potential existence is either no existence at all, or it is positive existence. If it is no existence, then we have true self-creation; which is, that out of nothing, and with no cause, actual existence starts itself. This is not only unthinkable, but absurd. But if potential existence is positive, it needs to be accounted for as much as actual. While, then, there can be no doubt as to the validity of the conclusions to which Mr. Spencer arrives, respecting the entire incompetency of the hypotheses of self-existence and self-creation, to account for the Universe, the distinction made above between self-existence as a true and self-creation as a pseudo idea, and the fact that the true idea is a reality, should never be lost sight of. By failing to discriminate—as in the Understanding he could not do—between them, and by concluding both as objects alike impossible to the human intellect, and for the same reasons, he has also decided that the "commonly received or theistic hypothesis"—creation by external agency—is equally untenable. In his examination of this, he starts as usual with his ever-present, fallacious assumption, that this is a "conception"; that it can be, is founded upon a "cumulative process of thought, or the fulfilment of predictions based on it." These words, phrases, and notions, are all irrelevant. It is not a conception, process, or prediction that we want; it is a sight. Hence, no assumptions have to be made or granted. No "proceedings of a human artificer" can in the least degree "vaguely symbolize to us" the "method after which the Universe" was "shaped." This differed in kind from all possible human methods, and had not one element in common with them.