INTRODUCTION 



losophy " about the relations between matter 

 and mind, and about our consequent right to 

 define the ultimate reality in quasi-psychical 

 terms. And finally there is some discussion of 

 the difficult question regarding Spencer's atti- 

 tude toward this last problem.^ 



42. The final stage of Fiske's thought on 

 these subjects is represented by the papers col- 



^ As, in the final edition of the First Principles^ pub- 

 lished in 1900, it appears, from Spencer's restatement and ex- 

 pansion of his former § 71, that Spencer never can have 

 w^holly agreed w^ith Fiske's statement of his view about the 

 "impassable gulf," and can have meant to accept Fiske's 

 form of the argument only in so far as the relation between 

 a mental and material world was thereby declared to be in- 

 scrutable, it is unnecessary further to follow Fiske's account, 

 here and often repeated, of Spencer's acceptance, in a per- 

 sonal conversation, of the general sense of Fiske's chapter 

 on ''Matter and Spirit" in the Cosmic Philosophy. Of 

 course Spencer is indeed no materialist. Moreover, Spencer 

 no doubt found the chapter, as he then understood it, in the 

 main acceptable. But with regard to just the point of which 

 Fiske's later teleological disposition made so much, Spencer, 

 had the matter been presented to him side by side with the 

 consequences that Fiske drew, would not have agreed. And 

 the divergence later increased. For Fiske the ** impassable 

 gulf" becomes in his closing period a means of interpreting 

 the material phenomena in terms of a hypothetical spiritual 

 principle, which remains, indeed, in many respects inscrutable, 

 but which in his later period he identifies with the God of 

 religion. And the purely hypothetical spiritual realm of The 

 Unseen World has now become for Fiske that in which 

 cxxxi 



