HERBERT SPENCER AND HIS WORK. 453 



recalling the many luminous passages in which Mr. Spencer has 

 stated and restated his position, will of necessity refuse to in- 

 dorse. So frequently, indeed, has our author repudiated, not by 

 phrases only, but by arguments, the charges made against him on 

 this popular count, that repetition of them must be taken to imply 

 either oversight, or misconception, or deliberate attempt to force 

 upon him, for polemical purposes, opinions which he has consist- 

 ently disowned and even vigorously opposed. How, then, we 

 may ask, turning directly to his own writings, does the case 

 really stand ? 



Briefly thus. The chemist can not explain the ultimate nature 

 of matter, nor the physicist the ultimate nature of motion, nor the 

 psychologist the ultimate nature of mind. Matter, motion, mind 

 are but symbols, expressing for us the manifestations of an un- 

 known power, and, pushed to the utmost limits of simplification, 

 the symbols remain symbols still. The question at issue between 

 spiritualists and materialists, therefore, viewed from the Spen- 

 cerian standpoint, resolves itself into a question of these symbols, 

 and any answer that can conceivably be given leaves us as com- 

 pletely outside the reality as we were at first. Spirit and matter 

 must thus be regarded simply as signs of the ultimate existence 

 which underlies both ; and though we may lean to the spiritualis- 

 tic rather than to the materialistic side though of the two it may 

 seem " easier to translate so-called matter into so-called spirit than 

 to translate so-called spirit into so-called matter (which latter is 

 indeed wholly impossible " * ), yet we must remember that no such 

 translation will carry us beyond our symbols into a knowledge of 

 that for which they stand. 



Manifestly, then, the absolute and unconditioned existence 

 which transcends human intelligence and in which the subject, 

 object, spirit, matter of our finite consciousness merge and are 

 united, is not for Mr. Spencer mere zero a negation of thought. 

 It is a positive fact of the profoundest certitude ; or rather let us 

 say it is the final fact sustaining all others the fact which science 

 finds at the back of its widest generalizations and beneath its 

 deepest truths. And this final fact of science, this ultimate datum 

 of consciousness, upon which all knowledge depends, this cause of 

 all causes in the universe as it is revealed to us, is the permanent 

 foundation of all religion as well. Here the ancient foes meet in 

 complete reconciliation. Science must necessarily end in the 

 mystery with which religion begins. " That which persists un- 

 changing in quantity but ever changing in form," under the sen- 

 sible appearances "which the universe presents to us," is an 

 " unknown and unknowable power which we are obliged to recog- 



* The Principles of Psychology, 63. 



