3 o6 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



substitutes for them an Unknowable, a something which they really are, though 

 we cannot know it, and rejects that, instead of them, from knowledge." 



This statement has caused me no little astonishment. That hav- 

 ing before him the volume from which he quotes, so competent a 

 reader should have so completely missed the meaning of the passages 

 (§ 26) already referred to, in which I have contended against Ham- 

 ilton and Mansel, makes me almost despair of being understood by 

 any ordinary reader. In that section, I have, in the first place, con- 

 tended that the consciousness of an Ultimate Reality, though not 

 capable of being made a thought, properly so called, because not 

 capable of being brought within limits, nevertheless remains as a 

 mode of consciousness that is positive: is not rendered negative by 

 the negation of limits. I have pointed out that — 



" The error (very naturally fallen into by philosophers intent on demon- 

 strating the limits and conditions of consciousness) consists in assuming that 

 consciousness contains nothing but limits and conditions ; to the entire neglect 

 of that which is limited and conditioned. It is forgotten that there is some- 

 thing which alike forms the raw material of definite thought and remains after 

 the definiteness which thinking gave to it has been destroyed," something 

 which "ever persists in us as the body of a thought to which we can give no 

 shape." 



This positive element of consciousness it is, which, "at once 

 necessarily indefinite and necessarily indestructible," I regard as the 

 consciousness of the Unknowable Reality. Yet Dr. Hodgson says 

 " Mr. Spencer proceeds to use these inconceivable ideas as the basis of 

 his philosophy:" implying that such basis consists of negations, 

 instead of consisting of that which persists notwithstanding the 

 negation of limits. And then, beyond this perversion, or almost 

 inversion, of meaning, he conveys the notion that I take, as the basis 

 of philosophy, the " inconceivable ideas " " or self-contradictory 

 notions " which result when we endeavor to comprehend Space and 

 Time. He speaks of me as proposing to evolve substance out of 

 form, or, rather, out of negations of forms — gives his readers no con- 

 ception that the Power manifested to us is that which I regard as the 

 Unknowable, while what we call Space and Time answer to the 

 unknowable nexus of its manifestations. And yet the chapter from 

 which I quote, and still more the chapter which follows it, makes 

 this clear — as clear, at least, as I can make it by carefully-worded 

 statements and restatements. 



Philosophical systems, like theological ones, following the law of 

 evolution in general, severally become in course of time more rigid, 

 while becoming more complex and more definite ; and they similarly 

 become less alterable — resist all compromise, and have to be replaced 

 by the more plastic systems that descend from them. 



