The Persistence of Force. 93 



by any inductive or experimental process, the truth 

 of the persistence of force, is clearly impossible : what 

 we know by experience throughout all the knowable 

 is not persistence, but mutability. No single mani- 

 festation of force abides. Mr. Spencer acknowledges 

 that it is so. " We are compelled to admit that Force 

 as it exists out of our consciousness is not force as we 

 know it. Hence the force of which we assert per- 

 sistence, is that Absolute Force of which we are 

 indefinitely conscious as the necessary correlate of 

 the force we know. By the persistence of Force, 

 we really mean the persistence of some Cause, which 

 transcends our knowledge and conception. In other 

 words, asserting the persistence of Force is asserting 

 an Unconditioned Reality without beginning or end." * 

 " Once more," he says elsewhere, " we are brought 

 round to the conclusion, repeatedly reached by other 

 routes, that behind all manifestations, inner and outer, 

 there is a Power manifested. Here, as before, it has 

 become clear that while the nature of this Power 

 cannot be known while we lack the faculty of fram- 

 ing even the dimmest conception of it, yet its universal 

 presence is the absolute fact without which there can 

 be no relative facts. Every feeling and thought being 

 but transitory an entire life made up of such feelings 

 and thoughts being also but transitory nay, the 

 objects amid which life is passed, though less transi- 



* First Principle*, 62. 



