THE UNKNOWABLE 



This letter refers to a conversation of the year 

 before, so that at the age of twenty-eight the 

 young engineer "had reached," as he says, "a 

 quite definite form of that conviction" which he 

 found it desirable to set forth twelve years later in 

 First Principles. 



The idea that all objective things are merely the 

 signs or manifestations or symbols of reality is 

 familiar to all of us ; and the word phenomena is an 

 expression of this idea. Behind all such phenom- 

 ena we are compelled to postulate a noumenon, or 

 reality, which the very nature of our knowledge 

 renders forever unknowable to us. And in our 

 haste we may be tempted to suppose that this con- 

 ception of phenomenon and noumenon suffices to 

 express all that we need to say of reality ; but so to 

 suppose would be to forget the mind to which 

 these phenomena or appearances are presented. 

 That mind is a reality, or the expression of a reality, is 

 even more certain than that there is a reality behind 

 matter. Are we then committed to a dualism of 

 mind as one entity and the objective universe, or 

 the reality which it represents, as another? At 

 first sight this would appear to be the conclusion. 



Now we find, in reading the Synthetic Philosophy, 

 that its author uses the word phenomena in a wider 

 sense than that above indicated; and official phi- 

 losophers have declared the whole Spencerian sys- 

 tem invalid because of what they call the con- 

 fusion which enters into Spencer's use of this word. 

 335 



