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metaphysics furnishes no such apparatus, for by its own showing* 
the highest capacity into which the intellect of man can be 
developed can never rise beyond the actions and reactions of 
a definite quantum of nervous matter, as it is acted on by a 
definite quantum of existing stimuli. How can such a mind 
know space, or time, or God? How can it even think of 
them ? Or how, with the materials which are furnished for it 
to work upon, can it construct for itself the conceptions of such 
entities ? We are well aware that Spencer, with a naivete that 
is charming, often breaks from the logical chain which should 
bind him to his system, and flies and even soars above it, in 
speculations concerning the mysterious unknown that is sym- 
bolized to men by its perpetual approximations to reality, 
which are doomed ever to change because they must ever fail 
to do justice to the unreachable and inexpressible truth. We 
know very well that he represents it as the crowning glory of 
his system of development, that it satisfies maAs belief that 
there is an unknowable object of longing and worship, and 
that his conceptions of its nature must be for ever changing 
because .inadequate. But we cannot see how, upon his own 
theory, he finds any place even for the conceptions of what he 
says cannot be known, for the reason that he makes the very 
conception impossible. It would seem to us that in order to 
know that we cannot know it, we must know what the some- 
thing is which we cannot know, and for the power to conceive 
such an entity his theory literally and figuratively provides no 
place in the human brain. It is doubtless grateful to him now 
and then to break from the limits of his own principles to 
contemplate some of the many things in heaven and earth 
which are not dreamed of in his philosophy ; but he should 
never be permitted to stray beyond the inclosure within which 
he has confined himself lest he impale himself upon some of 
the stakes with which he has hedged himself about. A philo- 
sophy which cannot even think of time, or space, or God, has 
already doomed itself to self-destruction, however ambitious it 
may be to settle questions which it has demonstrated its 
incompetency to entertain. 
But we ought to bring our meditation to a close. No 
phenomenon of modern thinking is more marvellous than the 
suddenness with which the physiological metaphysics took 
form and attracted to itself public attention. It is far more 
wonderful that it should have been accepted with so little 
scrutiny, and been assented to with so blind and headlong an 
allegiance by large classes of men who claim to be little more 
than laymen in both physiology and philosophy. It is more 
