Herbert Spencerh Synthetic Philosophy. 99 



on from the beginning of evolution ? " (Spencer's Principles 

 of Psychology, vol. ii, p. 555.) 



What may be called, with propriety, Relationism, the doc- 

 trine that we know objective relations as they actually exist, 

 belongs to crude realism, and it has no philosophical basis 

 whatever. The theory that the intellect alone constitutes 

 relations, that we intellectually reconstitute and therefore 

 understand the relations making up the noumenal constitu- 

 tion of things, is an old conception, sometimes put forward 

 in these later days as original, in a phraseology which at 

 first makes difficult the immediate discovery of its identity 

 with a system that has been weighed in the balance and 

 found wanting. One of these relational philosophers main- 

 tains that space relations belong to the noumenal world. 

 But these are relations constituted by the facts of sensibility, 

 and the theorist referred to does not allow sensibility to 

 contribute to knowledge. He can not, therefore, consist- 

 ently maintain that space relations are knowingly apper- 

 ceived by us. 



Although there seems to be almost a complete unanimity 

 among the great thinkers of the world that we can form no 

 conception of the objective world apart from the conditions 

 imposed upon it by our intelligence, and that changes of 

 consciousness are the materials out of which our knowledge 

 is entirely built, let no one hastily conclude that there is 

 anything in this position inimical to, or inconsistent with, 

 what is called " objective science." Prof. Huxley, one of 

 the greatest of living scientists and a philosophic thinker 

 of no mean ability, pursuing the " scientific method " with 

 which he is supposed to be well acquainted, comes to the 

 conclusion " that all the phenomena are, in tlieir ultimate 

 analysis, known to us only as facts of consciousness." 



George Henry Lewes, eminent as a physiologist and psy- 

 chologist, as well as a remarkably acute analytical thinker, 

 declares, in his Problems of Life and Mind : " Wliether we 

 affirm the objective existence of something distinct from the 

 affections of consciousness or affirm that this object is simply 

 a reflection from consciousness, in either case we declare 

 that the objective world is to each man the sum of his vis- 

 ionary experience — an existence bounded on all sides by 

 wliat he feels and thinks — a form sliaped by the reaction of 

 his organism. The world is the sum total of phenomena, 

 and phenomena are affections of consciousness with exter- 

 nal signs " (vol. i, p. 183). 



