Herbert Spencer's Synthetic Philosophy. 113 



losophy conceptions of matter and motion are treated merely 

 as symbols of an ultimate reality which is manifested be- 

 yond consciousness as matter and motion and in conscious- 

 ness as feeling and thought. Some writers have character- 

 ized Spencer's philosophy by the word dualism, to make it 

 appear to be in opposition to what they call " monism," 

 whereas Mr. Spencer is thoroughly monistic, since, as he 

 says : " I recognize no forces within the organism or with- 

 out the organism but the variously conditional modes of 

 the universal immanent force; and the whole process of 

 organic evolution is everywhere attributed by me to the co- 

 operation of its variously conditioned modes, internal and 

 external." 



Quite a common impression is that the doctrine that all 

 knowledge is relative, that we can not know the absolute, 

 carries with it the implication somehow that there is no 

 possibility of any plane of intelligent existence except that 

 known. 



There is nothing in the doctrine of the " absolute " or the 

 " unknowable," as expounded either by Kant or Spencer, 

 that is inconsistent with the continuance of life under other 

 conditions than those of the present state of being. There 

 is nothing in this doctrine which implies that man does 

 not survive physical death or that there are not higher 

 planes of existence than are known here. The philosophy 

 of the absolute or the unknowable merely teaches that all 

 knowledge is relative, that in perception there are two fac- 

 torsthe mind and the objective reality and that, instead of 

 actually perceiving the objective reality as it absolutely is, 

 the mind perceives a phenomenon, an appearance, a repre- 

 sentation symbolical of and corresponding with, but not a 

 likeness of, the objective thing. The " substratum " of men- 

 tal phenomena is no more known than is that of physical 

 phenomena. As Daniel Greenleaf Thompson says : " The 

 truth is, we are forced by the laws of cognition to postulate 

 an unknown reality behind the known reality, both of mat- 

 ter and mind, a dark side of the material world and of in- 

 telligence, an imperceptible substantive being, put of which 

 somehow comes the perceptible, and into which it disap- 

 pears, a source of both material and mental phenomena, a 

 cause of their effects, a permanent in which alone change is 

 possible, a possibility for all actualities and a power which 

 transcends knowledge but which is presupposed in all 

 knowledge. This is the meaning of the paradox." 



