The stage of Science represented by the French Encyclopædists was immediately hostile to each and every form of religion. This second stage, however, has a choice. It can, like Hamilton or Mansel, let religious belief alone, as pertaining to the unknown and unknowable—which may be believed in as much as one likes; or it may “strip off,” as Spencer does, “determinations from a religion,” by which it is distinguished from other religions, and show their truth to consist in a common doctrine held by all, to-wit: “The truth of things is unknowable.”
Thus the scientific man can baffle all attacks from the religious standpoint; nay, he can even elicit the most unbounded approval, while he saps the entire structure of Christianity.
Says Spencer (p. 46): “Science and Religion agree in this, that the power which the Universe manifests to us is utterly inscrutable.” He goes on to show that though this harmony exists, yet it is broken by the inconsistency of Religion: “For every religion, setting out with the tacit assertion of a mystery, forthwith proceeds to give some solution of this mystery, and so asserts that it is not a mystery passing human comprehension.” In this confession he admits that all religions agree in professing to reveal the solution of the Mystery of the Universe to man; and they agree, moreover, that man, as simply a being of sense and reflection, cannot comprehend the revelation; but that he must first pass through a profound mediation—be regenerated, not merely in his heart, but in intellect also. The misty limitations (“vagueness and confusion”) of the imagination must give way to the purifying dialectic of pure thought before one can see the Eternal Verities.
These revelations profess to make known the nature of the Absolute. They call the Absolute “Him,” “Infinite,” “Self-created,” “Self-existent,” “Personal,” and ascribe to this “Him” attributes implying profound mediation. All definite forms of religion, all definite theology, must at once be discarded according to Spencer’s principle. Self-consciousness, even, is regarded as impossible by him (p. 65): “Clearly a true cognition of self implies a state in which the knowing and known are one, in which subject and object are identified; and this Mr. Mansel rightly holds to be the annihilation of both.” He considers it a degradation (p. 109) to apply personality to God: “Is it not possible that there is a mode of being as much transcending intelligence and will as these transcend mechanical motion?” And again (p. 112) he holds that the mere “negation of absolute knowing contains more religion than all dogmatic theology.” (P. 121,) “All religions are envelopes of truth, which reveal to the lower and conceal to the higher.” (P. 66,) “Objective and subjective things are alike inscrutable in their substance and genesis.” “Ultimate religious and scientific ideas (p. 68) alike turn out to be mere symbols of the actual, and not cognitions of it.” (P. 69,) “We come to the negative result that the reality existing behind all appearances must ever be unknown.”
In these passages we see a dualism posited in this form: “Everything immediate is phenomenal, a manifestation of the hidden and inscrutable essence.” This essence is the unknown and unknowable; yet it manifests itself in the immediate or phenomenal.
The first stage of thought was unconscious that it dealt all the time with a mediated result (a dualism) while it assumed an immediate; that it asserted all truth to lie in the sensuous object, while it named at the same time “matter and force,” categories of reflection.
The second stage has got over that difficulty, but has fallen into another. For if the phenomenon manifested the essence, it could not be said to be “unknowable, hidden, and inscrutable.” But if the essence is not manifested by the phenomenon, then we have the so-called phenomenon as a self-existent, and therefore independent of the so-called essence, which stands coördinated to it as another existent, which cannot be known because it does not manifest itself to us. Hence the “phenomenon” is no phenomenon, or manifestation of aught but itself, and the “essence” is simply a fiction of the philosopher.
Hence his talk about essence is purely gratuitous, for there is not shown the need of one.
A dialectical consideration of essence and phenomenon will result as follows: