28 AGNOSTICISM. 



as such, Implies anything beyond It : the not-known 

 remains a merely logical possibility, an empty figure 

 of speech, devoid of real content : It can lend no 

 help to Infer the real contrary of knowledge, the 

 2tnknown, and still less does It Involve the un- 

 knowable. ^ 



§ 8. But Mr. Spencer, after the fashion of agnost- 

 ics, lays far more stress on the Indirect than on the 



1 Mr. Spencer, when hard pressed for reasons in favour of a 

 positive unknowable, does indeed make use of another argument 

 (" First Princ," p. 88), which respect for his other achievements 

 must make his critics reluctant to dwell on. He suggests that 

 " besides the definite consciousness of which logic formulates the 

 laws, there is also an indefinite consciousness which cannot be 

 formulated . . . and which is yet real as being a normal 

 affection of the intellect." 



Is not this a clear confession of the extra-logical character of 

 the agnostic's faith in the Unknowable ? And there has been 

 nothing like this "indefinite consciousness," invented to know the 

 Unknowable, since the days when Plato declared that Not-Being 

 was vo^o) Xoyto-/xa) airrov^ to be grasped only by spurious reasoning! 

 And the spuriousness of its nature seems to affect also the 

 arguments in its favour, for a little further down we find Mr. 

 Spencer contending that "an argument . . . which assigns 

 to a term a certain meaning, but ends in showing that this term 

 has no such meaning, is simply elaborate suicide. Clearly then 

 the very demonstration that a definite consciousness of the 

 Absolute is impossible unavoidably presupposes an indefinite 

 consciousness of it." Has Mr. Spencer never heard of the method 

 of reductio ad absurdum^ and does he regard the fourth propos- 

 ition of the first book of Euclid as a suicidal argument ? And 

 does he seriously think -that " the very proof that a definite 

 consciousness of Unicorns or Chimeras, is impossible, must 

 necessarily involve an indefinite consciousness of them " ? And 

 would the proof of the fictitious character of unicorns really 

 destroy in his mind the reality of their " correlative," all two- 

 horned animals ? It would have been better if in matters of 

 logic, one of the few subjects to which he could not claim to have 

 made any important addition, he had followed, as in the rest of 

 his arguments for Agnosticism, the guidance of Mansel and of 

 Hamilton. 



