Nineteenth-Century Science and Religion 163 



By taking the limits away little by little the whole consciousness 

 is not destroyed, but only that part of it which is definite, limited, 

 and determined. There remains an undefined, unlimited, in- 

 determinate consciousness, a kind of nebula, in which there is a 

 vague comprehension of the Absolute. This is the only way in 

 which we can grasp that inscrutable power. We must not seek 

 farther. It cannot be our duty, as Mansel believed, to imagine 

 God as a Personal Conscience, and as Infinite, if personality and 

 immensity are mutually exclusive ; it cannot be our duty to believe 

 in the absurd. It can only be our duty to subject ourselves to the 

 limits of our thought and to recognise a mystery which reallv 

 exists. It is derogatory to the Divinity to wish to enclose it in 

 our own concepts, in our own inadequate symbols. Until religion 

 abandons the attempt to conceive the Inscrutable Being in a defi- 

 nite manner, the conflict will continue with science, which will be 

 right to criticise these false concepts. But scientific necessity in 

 its turn will not have to be driven to such a point as to deny that 

 imperishable truth which lies at the foundation of religion — the 

 existence of an Unknowable Power which surpasses all thought and 

 all human symbol. 



Spencer, by trying to ascend beyond logical thought to a form 

 of indefinite consciousness in which the precise limits of our 

 concepts are not yet clearly laid down, marks the prelude to the 

 Intuitionism of Bergson. In what he says of the indistinct 

 consciousness, of that kind of nebulous psychic life, in which the 

 solid nucleus of the intelligence is formed afterwards, he seems 

 to read within the lines of Bergson's words : " Autour de la 

 pensee conceptuelle subsiste une frange indistincte qui en rappelle 

 Torigine " In Spencer, however, who is still imprisoned in the 

 old intellectualist conception of consciousness, this way of learning 

 realities does not seem a true and proper consciousness. Science 

 with its determined concepts is for him the true knowledge. The 

 undefined consciousness, although he tries to transform it into a 

 positive notion, remains for him a purely negative abstraction. In 

 this night, the darkness of which is complete, and which not even 

 the light of a symbol can illumine, all possible determination vanishes, 

 and with it all concrete form of religious life. Spencer's pre- 

 tended conciliation succeeds only in appearance. The Unknow- 

 able is, like the Absolute of Schelling, the night in which all the 

 cows are black, and in which everything disappears. Science and 



