INTRODUCTION 



For It is indeed impossibie, as Spencer himself 

 maintains in the passage which Fiske quotes 

 from the "Psychology," to conceive the transfor- 

 mation of force into feeling. But on the other 

 hand, it is conceivable that the units of which 

 the material world is made may be, when viewed 

 apart from our consciousness, themselves of the 

 nature of feeling. Spencer indeed maintains, and 

 Fiske, so far in his philosophical development, 

 admits, that thus to conceive matter would in 

 no sense make the ultimate reality less inscrut- 

 able. But Fiske reasons upon this very basis 

 that we can come nearer, for our own purposes, 

 to defining the ultimate reality by symbolically 

 conceiving it as mental than by attempting to 

 conceive it as material. " Provided we bear in 

 mind the symbolic character of our words, we 

 may say that ' God is Spirit,' though we may 

 not say, in the materialistic sense, that ' God is 

 Force.' " To be sure, we do not thus admit 

 the right to clothe our conception of the Deity 

 with " definable psychical attributes." We must 

 avoid as much as ever using the words " Intelli- 

 gence" and "Volition" with regard to the Deity; 

 for these are names of " circumscribed modes 

 of psychical activity in man and some other 

 animals." We have nevertheless won by these 

 considerations a certain addition to our " pos- 

 itive attitude." And Fiske now feels himself 

 xcvii * 



