THE DOCTRINE OF THE UNKNOWABLE. 433 
as necessary truth that of which it cannot possibly conceive, and which is contra- 
dicted by its conception? Sir William Hamilton himself seems to have had 
a suspicion of this, for he declares that ‘‘ by a wonderful revelation we are thus, 
in the very consciousness of our inability to conceive ought above the relatiye and 
finite, inspired with the belief in the existence of something unconditioned beyond 
the sphere of all comprehensible reality,’? which simply means that Sir William 
Hamilton, after having made a mistake in his application of the law of thought, 
whereby he had proved that infinite and absolute Being could not be, still could 
not rid himself, as others claimed to have done, of the conviction that there is 
such Being. | 
The quotations from Mr. Mansel are from his ‘‘ Limitations of Religious 
Thought,” and we copy: ‘‘The very conception of consciousness, in whatever 
mode it may be manifested, necessarily implies distinction between one object 
and another. To be conscious, we must be conscious of some thing, and some 
thing can only be known as that which it is by being distinguished from that which 
it is not. But distinction is necessarily limitation ; for, 1f one object is to be dis- 
tinguished from another, it must not possess some form which the other has. But 
it is obvious the infinite cannot be distinguished as such, from the finite by the 
absence of any quality the finite possesses, for such absence would be a limitation, 
Nor yet can it be distinguished by the presence of an attribute which the finite has 
not, for, as no finite part can be a constituent of an infinite whole, this differential 
characteristic must itself be infinite, and must at the same time have nothing in 
common with the finite. We are thus thrown back upon our former impossibility ; 
for this second infinite will be distinguished from the first by the absence of quali- 
ties which the latter possesses. Consciousness of the Infinite, as such, thus neces- 
sarily involves a self-contradiction, for it implies the recognition of a limitation 
and difference of that which can be given only as unlimited and indifferent.” This 
only proves that Mr. Mansel has wholly mistaken the nature of the conception he 
is discussing, holding that it must be something different from any thing that can 
be; and his mistake has led into a self-contradiction, which ought to have been suf- 
ficient to have warned him of his error. But to extricate himself he proceeds 
thus: ‘‘ This contradiction, which is utterly inexplicable on the supposition that 
the Infinite is a positive object of human thought, is at once accounted for when 
it isregarded as the mere negation of thought. If all thought is limitation—if what 
we conceive is, by the very act of conception, regarded as finite, the Infinite, 
from a human point of view, is merely a name for the absence of those condi- 
tions under which thought is possible.” That is to say in plain language, there 
is no Infinite; it is nothing. Yet Mr. Mansel holds that we are compelled by the 
conditions of our minds to believe in the existence ofthe Infinite, as the comple- 
ment of our consciousness of the finite; whereby he falls into the same absurdity 
that characterized the reasoning of Sir William Hamilton. 
To these proofs of an unknowable, such as they are, which Mr. Spencer ap- 
proves, he adds one of his own. Hissays: ‘‘ Every complete act of conscious- 
IV—28 
