98 Herhert Spencefs Synthetic PJiilosophy. 



as the inherited organization is developed at the time it 

 comes into activity. Thus the consciousness of space is 

 reached through a process of evolution. 



But does not the mind possess a synthetic power by which 

 it can put together the materials furnished by the senses, 

 and thus enable us to realize and understand the objective 

 world as it actually exists? Is there not in the mind a 

 faculty by which we can discover relations as they are be- 

 yond consciousness ? If we do not know the nature of nou- 

 menal existence, we can not know anything about its rela- 

 tions. Kant dwelt upon this subject for years ; and, although 

 he believed in an existence transcending sense and under- 

 standing, the conclusion of his years of laborious thought 

 was that we can only put together the materials furnished 

 by the senses, and that we can know nothing of the world 

 as it exists, unmodified by and independent of conscious- 

 ness. To the same conclusion, after years of profound 

 thought, came Herbert Spencer. 



Mr. Spencer holds that things in themselves are not per- 

 ceived, yet that they correspond with perceptions, and are 

 known symbolically only ; that " there exist beyond con- 

 sciousness conditions of objective manifestation which are 

 symbolized by relations as we conceive them." The object- 

 ive existences and conditions which remain as the final 

 necessity of thought arc tlie correlatives of our feelings and 

 the relations between them. There is no valid reason for the 

 belief that the objective existence is what it appears to be, 

 nor for the belief that the connections among its modes are 

 what they seem in consciousness. There is congruity, but not 

 resemblance, between the external and the internal order. 



" Inner thoughts," says Spencer, " answer to outer things 

 in such wise that cohesions in the one correspond to persist- 

 ences in the other," but this correspondence is only sym- 

 bolical. Such, briefly stated, is the view which, in distinc- 

 tion to crude realism and idealism, is called Transfigured 

 Realism. " It recognizes," to quote again from the great 

 thinker, "an external, independent existence which is the 

 cause of changes in consciousness, while the effects it works 

 in consciousness constitute the perception of it ; and the 

 inference is that tlie knowledge constituted by these effects 

 can not be a knowledge of that which causes them, but can 

 only imply its existence. May it not be said that in thus in- 

 terpreting itself subjective existence makes definite that dif- 

 ferentiation from objective existence which has been going 



