1 62 Science Religion and Reality 



intelligence. It is our duty to believe in the personality of God, 

 even though it appears contradictory to think of a personal Abso- 

 lute, because the character of personality presupposes alw^ays the 

 distinction from other persons. We must believe in the dogma 

 of the Redemption and in eternal punishment, even if they are 

 opposed to our conceptions of love and justice, because these ideas, 

 like all the others, are relative to the weakness of the human 

 understanding. Forgiveness, for example, could be a duty only 

 of man, who has need to bridle his selfish tendencies, and not for 

 the Divine conscience. Against the agnosticism of Mansel one 

 could remark that it is not possible to believe in an object except in 

 so far as it is conceived in some way. Faith is, in fact, nothing 

 but the free adhesion of the consciousness to the reality of some 

 thing ; it presupposes therefore the possibility of thinking of that 

 thing as existent. Hamilton and Mansel say, on the contrary, that 

 the Unconditioned is not only unknowable, but is frankly incon- 

 ceivable. Now if it is incapable of being thought of in any way, 

 what meaning can faith in it have .? Faith in what ? In nothing ? 

 If there is no conception of the Absolute, if religious truths are 

 contradictory and therefore cannot be thought of, they will remain 

 nothing but words. Will people then believe in words which 

 have no meaning .? To believe without knowing in what one 

 believes is a phrase devoid of all meaning. 



Spencer tries hard to overcome this difficulty with which 

 agnosticism is faced. The Absolute, although it escapes every 

 attempt to enclose it in a precise thought, is not a mere negation of 

 consciousness, as Hamilton and Mansel considered it. It would 

 be impossible to talk of the relative if there were not the opposite 

 term — the Absolute. If this term were eliminated, the relative 

 would itself become the absolute reality. The unconditioned, 

 the unlimited, and the absolute must therefore be present in con- 

 sciousness in some way. Mansel and Hamilton speak of the 

 marvellous revelation which faith gives us of the Absolute. They 

 too, then, end by recognising the possibility of learning it in a certain 

 way. Spencer is perfectly right in this. The Absolute escapes 

 from conceptual thought, but not from consciousness in general. 

 In addition to that definite logical consciousness which functions 

 by laying down limits, there is an undefined, indeterminate con- 

 sciousness which constitutes as it were the common foundation, the 

 raw material from which the various conceptual forms are moulded. 



