to be a philosopher, for he lacks entirely the ingegno filosofico, and we have not discovered a single trace of a philosophic principle, thought, or conception in any or all of his several works. He is or might be a physicist, or what old Ralph Cudworth terms a physiologer, perhaps not much inferior to old Leucippus or Democritus, but he has not in him the makings of a philosopher, and his cosmic theories are not even plausible to a philosophic mind.
“In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed is king.” The not inconsiderable reputation Mr. Herbert Spencer seems to have acquired is probably due not to his merits so much as to the low state into which philosophical studies have fallen in the Anglo-Saxon world, and the tendency to anti-Christian and anti-religious theories and speculations which Protestantism, when it begins to examine its own foundation and to account for itself, everywhere encourages. The party we meet here and in England, with “advanced views” as they are called, and which every day grows in numbers and strength, welcomes with enthusiasm any and every writer who helps or promises to help them to explain the problem of the universe on physical principles, without recurring to the supernatural or the fact of creation. The party, profoundly ignorant of Christian theology and philosophy, and devoted to the study of physical facts and phenomena alone, have persuaded themselves that Christianity is unscientific, and that it tends to degrade men, to enfeeble reason, and to prevent
the free expansion of thought; and they regard as their benefactor whoever is able to strengthen their cosmic or atheistic tendency. Such a man they esteem Mr. Herbert Spencer. He is apparently just the man to be accepted as the chief of the sect, or the philosopher of negation. Its adherents wish not for their leader an avowed atheist or pantheist, for the world is not just yet advanced enough for that, but they do wish one who is skilful in disguising his atheism or pantheism in the forms and terms of science; and who can do this more successfully than Herbert Spencer?
Mr. Spencer divides his book into two parts. In Part I. he treats of what he calls “The Unknowable”; in Part II. he treats of what he calls “The Knowable.” Under the head of “The Unknowable” he seeks the relation of science and religion, to ascertain the ultimate verity or ideas of each, and to show the ground on which they meet and are reconciled. He asserts that all knowledge is relative, is knowledge of phenomena alone, which are nothing outside of their relation to consciousness, itself phenomenal, and to a Something underlying them, and of which they are the appearances or which they manifest. We are compelled to admit, he says, this Something, because the phenomena cannot be thought without it; and as we can assign no limit to these manifestations, we are compelled to assert this Something, Power, Being, or Reality is infinite. But this Infinite Something which is the reality of the cosmos is absolutely unknowable and even unthinkable. How, then, can it be asserted?
Every religion seeks the solution of the problem of the universe, the explanation of the great cosmic mystery that surrounds us on all sides, and all religions agree that the solution
is in this infinite Reality or Something, which is absolutely unknowable, absolutely inscrutable. The ultimate religious ideas or highest and most comprehensive generalizations of religious conceptions are, first, the assertion of this incognizable and incogitable Something; and, second, that the solution of the problem exceeds all human powers.
Science deals with the same cosmic problem, and, rising by generalization to generalization of the cosmic phenomena up to the higher and broadest possible, is compelled to admit the same Infinite Something, and to admit that it is not cognizable nor cogitable. Consequently, the ultimate scientific ideas are identical with the ultimate religious ideas. Both religion and science are fused together, and reconciled without any compromise, and the old feud between them extinguished, in the bosom of the Infinite Unknowable.
“He makes a solitude, and calls it peace.”
As we have no predisposition to accept the new system of philosophy, we cannot find this conclusion perfectly satisfactory. The cosmists object to the Comteans or positivists that they absorb the cosmos in man and society; the cosmists, on the other hand, seem to us to absorb man and society in the cosmos, and subject them to the same physical law Mr. Emerson does when he asserts the identity of gratitude and gravitation. By asserting that only phenomena are cognizable, and subjecting man to the common cosmic law, they include him in the cosmic phenomena, and make him simply an appearance or manifestation of the unknowable, without any real or substantive existence of his own. We thus lose in the infinite variety of the cosmic phenomena both the thinking subject