mind and the world, according to Mr. Spencer—we know something has impressed us, but how or what we cannot find out.
“Thus the universe, as we know it,” says Dr. Mivart, “disappears not only from our gaze, but from our very thought. Not only the song of the nightingale, the brilliancy of the diamond, the perfume of the rose, and the savor of the peach lose for us all objective reality—these we might spare and live—but the solidity of the very ground we tread on, nay, even the coherence and integrity of our own material frame, dissolve from us, and leave us vaguely floating in an insensible ocean of unknown potentiality.”
This is “transfigured realism” with a vengeance, and leaves us somewhat at a loss to know what can be meant by idealism. It practically differs not from the doctrine of Berkeley and Hume; for it matters little to us whether external objects exist or not, if they are in and by themselves something “unknown and unknowable,” altogether different from what we consider them to be. The radical fault of Mr. Spencer’s “transfigured realism” is that he mistakes sensations themselves for the act of the mind which is concerned about them; and when in reality he speaks merely of the sensations as such, he imagines he has in view purely speculative intellectual acts. Such confusion is quite natural in a philosopher who recognizes no form of idea but transformed sensation, no purely unimaginable conceivability. This is evident when he says:
“We can think of matter only in terms of mind. We can think of mind only in terms of matter. When we have pushed our explorations of the first to the uttermost limit, we are referred to the second for final answer; and when we have got the final answer of the second, we are referred back to the first for an interpretation of it.”
Thus is he compelled to revolve in a circular process which makes the knowledge of mind depend on the knowledge of matter, and vice versâ. How admirably does the scholastic theory of the origin of thought dissipate the clouds which befog Mr. Spencer throughout this discussion, and prevent him from seeing to what consequences he blindly drifts! The unseen, the unfelt, the unheard are each and all absolutely nothing, so that sense alone can determine reality. Such is the philosophy of Mr. Spencer; and there can be no wonder that upon an analysis of premises he finds that, having set out from nothing, he lands upon the same unreal shore. Scholasticism—the philosophy which at the present time is returning into unexpected though much deserved vogue, superseding in the highest intellectual circles the tenuity of Kant’s unrealism and the sensism of Locke and Condillac—proposes an explanation of the relation of the external world to the intellect through the medium of the senses, which cannot but elicit the endorsement of every logical mind. Just at the point where Spencer modifies his subjective sensible impression received from the external world, in such a manner that he can find nothing corresponding to it outside of himself, the scholastic supposes the active intellect to seize this phantasm or sensible image, and, having so far divested it of its sensible qualities as to fit it to become the object of pure cognition, offers it to the mind cognitive for such cognition, which, as the true cognitive faculty, pronounces it to be the type or exemplar of the object, and this he calls the verbum mentis, or idea of the thing. The created light of our intellect, which is itself a participation in the uncreated divine
light, enables us to see and judge of what is exhibited to it through the organs of sense, surveying it, measuring it, and penetrating its general essence so far as to be able to perceive that it is the spiritualized resemblance of the object which primarily produced the sensation.
We do not here propose to offer any of the usual arguments in support of this system, apart from the palpable fact that it appears to offer to each faculty, sensitive and intellective, appropriate material for operation, but to contrast its adequacy with the confessed impotency of Spencer’s “transfigured realism.” And, indeed, not only is this latter impotent but eminently fallacious. In endeavoring to prove that the mind transfigures its sensations in such a manner that there can exist no correspondence between the sensation and the object, Mr. Spencer allows the decision to rest on his test-case of sound. With respect to the sensation produced on the auditory nerve by aërial undulations, he says that “the subjective state no more resembles its objective cause than the pressure which moves the trigger of a gun resembles the explosion which follows.” And again, summarizing the argument, he says: “All the sensations produced in us by environing things are but symbols of actions out of ourselves, the natures of which we cannot even conceive.” The fallacy of this statement it is not difficult to perceive; for Mr. Spencer rules out the action of the intellect, which can alone determine the value and significance of a sensation, and takes account only of the sensation itself, deeming it able to pronounce upon its own correspondence with its exciting object. Indeed, there can be no more correspondence
between a visual object and the sense of vision than there can be between sound and a vibration of the air, except in so far as the mind pronounces this to be the case after a due investigation of the respective conditions pertaining to both sensations. It is the mind alone which can determine that the sensation we call sound is the result of air undulations, just as it is the mind which determines that the color and outline of visual objects are as represented in vision. The fault, therefore, of Mr. Spencer’s view is that, having constituted sensation the sole and sufficient judge of its own objective validity and correspondence with external objects, he is compelled at once to fly to his chosen refuge and cherished haven of the “unknown and the unknowable.” Again is he guilty of another transparent fallacy when he asserts that a series of successive independent sensations are mistaken for a whole individual one, which we accordingly speak of as such. The instance he adduces is that of musical sound, “which is,” he says, “a seemingly simple feeling clearly resolvable into simpler feelings.” The implied inference is that, since experience proves this not to be a simple feeling, but resolvable into simpler ones, there can be no reciprocity between our sensations and their exciting causes. This reasoning might be accredited with ingenuity, were it not so extremely shallow. For what is a sensation but that which we feel? And if we feel it as one, it must be one. It matters not if each separate beat, contributing to produce musical sound, should, when heard alone, produce a feeling different from that caused by the combination of beats, since it is none the less true that the rapid combination
produces a sensation which is felt as one, and necessarily is one in consequence. Mr. Spencer seems to forget that causes in combination can produce results entirely different from those to which each cause separately taken can give rise; or, as Dr. Mivart says, “All that Mr. Spencer really shows and proves is that diverse conditions result in the evocation of diverse simple perceptions, of which perceptions such conditions are the occasions.” Mr. Spencer’s position, bolstered up as it is by the minutest analysis of mental consciousness and by a wealth of marvellously subtle reasoning, is after all but a prejudice. He is indisposed to admit aught but sensation, and hence plies his batteries against every other element which dares obtrude itself into the domain of thought. How suggestive of this fact are the following words:
“It needs but to think of a brain as a seat of nervous discharges, intermediate between actions in the outer world and actions in the world of thought, to be impressed with the absurdity of supposing that the connections among outer actions, after being transferred through the medium of nervous discharges, can reappear in the world of thought in the forms they originally had.”