112 Herbert Spencer's Synthetic Philosophy. 



says, " of which the properties of matter and motion necessi- 

 tating the process of evolution, with pain and wrong as its 

 concomitants, are the phenomenal manifestations." 



13. The religious sentiment, equally with the moral sense, 

 has been evolved through psychical conditions represented 

 by all the stages of life below man. The object of religious 

 sentiment is the unknowable reality. The essential truth 

 of religion is involved in a recognition of an absolute upon 

 which all phenomena depend, while its fundamental error 

 begins with investing this reality with anthropomorphic 

 qualities. 



14. All conceptions and systems, philosophical, ethical, 

 and religious ; language, government, poetry, art, science, 

 philosophy, and industrial pursuits; all human activities, 

 equally with animal and vegetable forms, plants, solar and 

 stellar ^systems have been evolved from a homogeneous, 

 indefinite, and incoherent condition to a heterogeneous, 

 definite, and coherent state. 



Such is the merest abstract, and a very imperfect one, of 

 the doctrine of evolution as maintained by Herbert Spencer. 



The doctrine of the unknowable is unwelcome to theolo- 

 gians generally and to those theologically inclined, because 

 it is opposed to all systems and theories based upon the as- 

 sumption of the knowledge of God his nature, attributes, 

 purpose, etc. It is opposed by others of anti-theological 

 views, because they think, especially when they see Unknow- 

 able printed with the initial letter a capital, that it implies 

 the existence of a God more or less like the theological 

 conception which they have renounced. Both classes may, 

 when they come to appreciate fully the reasoning by which 

 the conclusion has been reached by men like Kant and 

 Spencer, reconsider more carefully their objections, and 

 adopt the view in which are united all that is tenable in the 

 affirmation of the theist with all that is warranted in the 

 criticism of the atheist. 



One anti-theological writer characterizes Spencer's thought 

 as a " spook " philosophy ; on the other hand, an idealist, a 

 disciple of the late Prof. Thomas Hill Green, in the latest 

 number of the Journal of Speculative Philosophy (date, 

 January, 1888), speaks of " the philosophy of scientific ma- 

 terialism and agnosticism, of which Mr. Herbert Spencer 

 is the most distinguished exponent," of the "full-fledged 

 scientific materialistic philosophy of Lewes and Spencer and 

 their adjutants," ignoring the fact that in Spencer's phi- 



