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TWO HALF-TRUTHS

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it is conclusive surely it is equally conclusive (although Spencer himself will not see it so) against his own cherished doctrine of the unknowability of the ultimate Cause. For the whole process of human evolution is here unequivocally treated as the active self-manifestation of the principle of the Whole. And so the worship of Humanity and the worship of the Unknowable, each untenable in itself, are seen both to owe their vitality, as we might have surmised, to the partial and complementary truths which they respectively enshrine. And these truths are only kept apart by a distorted conception of the relation of reality to its appearances.

LECTURE IX

IDEALISM AND PAN-PSYCHISM

THE greater part of the last lecture was devoted to an analysis of the fallacy which seems to me to underlie philosophical agnosticism, and, in particular, to Spencer's wellknown application to religion of the sheer disjunction between reality and its appearances. The result of this disjunction is necessarily to leave the one member of it a blank abstraction, to which, as Spencer truly says, 'no attributes can be ascribed;' for if the qualitative nature of the manifestation throws no light on that which is manifested, the latter remains simply the bare fact of an existent somewhat. It is, in short, the old notion of substance as a support of accidents or as the bare point of existence to which the qualities are somehow attached. This comes out so plainly in Spencer's presentation of the agnostic position that it will be worth our while, before passing from the subject, to advert to another line of reflection by which he supports his conclusion. It is significant that he so frequently tells us that, while we can neither know nor conceive the nature of the Power manifested through phenomena, the existence of that Power is of all things the most certain. Thus in the chapter on 'The Relativity of all Knowledge ',1 where he expressly defends (against theorists who bid us 'rest wholly in the consciousness of phenomena ') the existence of a positive consciousness of the Absolute or Unconditioned, he insists that 'in the very denial of our power to learn what the Absolute is, there lies hidden the assumption that it is. . . . It is rigorously impossible to conceive that our knowledge is a knowledge of Appearances

1 First Principles, Part I, chap. iv.

1

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THE MYSTERY OF BEING'

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only, without at the same time conceiving a Reality of which they are appearances; for appearance without reality is unthinkable. . . . Clearly, then, Clearly, then, the very demonstration that a definite consciousness of the Absolute is impossible to us, unavoidably presupposes an indefinite consciousness of it. . . . The sense of a something which is conditioned in every thought cannot be got rid of.' He describes it as ' an indefinite notion of general existence, . . . an indefinite consciousness of something constant under all modes-of being apart from its appearances'. It is, accordingly, this notion of 'being' or of 'something' which Spencer has in view when he talks in another chapter of the utter incomprehensibleness of the simplest fact, considered in itself', and tells us that in its ultimate essence nothing can be known'. The ultimate essence is just the being of the thing, the 'that' of it as opposed to the 'what '-its existence as distinguished from its nature. The statement is, indeed, so paraphrased by a disciple: all things, he tells us, are 'in their essence unknowable, that is, in their reality as resting in what is. . . . Precisely that relation to the oneness of Being by which alone they are at all is neither known nor knowable.' 1

Now there is a sense in which Being may be described as an ultimate and abysmal mystery. It is the sense which fascinated Parmenides and Spinoza and many of the mystic theologians. Von Hartmann speaks of the ability to appreciate the problem of mere Being, or, as he calls it, of groundless subsistence, as the true touchstone of metaphysical talent. If nothing at all existed,' he says, 'no world, no process, no substance, and also, of course, no one to indulge in philosophic wonder, there would be nothing wonderful in that-it would be eminently natural and

1 J. Allanson Picton, Religion of the Universe, pp. 55-7. The book is inscribed To the Memory of Herbert Spencer, the first true reconciler of Religion and Science '.

2 Philosophy of the Unconscious, vol. iii, p. 196 (English translation).

there would be no problem to solve.' But, that anything at all exists, or how the somewhat on which everything else depends comes to exist-this is so unfathomably mysterious, he says, that when the question is once realized it eclipses all possible wonder at the detailed nature of the universe which thus exists. But if this be, as Hartmann calls it, the problem of problems before which we become rigid as before a Gorgon's head, it is obvious that it is, as he says, inherently insoluble-whether the metaphysician be human or divine. It is fruitless, if not absurd, to inquire, in Lotze's quaint phrase, 'how being is made,' how there comes to be anything at all. Even a divine metaphysician must start from the fact of his own existence; and we, as philosophers, have not to create the universe or to explain why there should be a universe at all, but to find out what kind of a universe it is. It becomes quite misleading, therefore, to speak as if we were cut off from a knowledge of the essence of things, because we have to take their existence for granted. From this point of view, there is nothing mysterious or unfathomable at all about being: there is nothing more to know about it than just 'being', or, as Spencer dilutes the term, 'the sense of a something' or 'an indefinite notion of general existence'. It is the beginning of knowledge, not its ultimate and transcendent goal. The task of knowledge, philosophical as well as scientific, is to make this indefinite consciousness definite, to discover what kind of a something it is that we have to deal with. But the agnostic way of putting it converts the mere that '-the fact of the thing's existence-into a profounder kind of 'what', and declares this to be unknowable. For such a procedure there is no justification either in the case of an individual thing or in the case of the Absolute. Of the Absolute it has been finely said, 'its predicates are the worlds'. We learn its nature through

1 Laurie, Synthetica, vol. ii, p. 88.

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THE IMMANENT GOD

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the facts of the universe, especially so far as any system or scale of values is discernible in them. This is the immanent God on our knowledge of whom it has been the purpose of this first course of lectures to insist.

way

The nature of ultimate Reality is to be read, therefore, in its manifestation, and may be read there truly. We may be sure the revelation is not exhaustive, for all revelation must be ad modum recipientis; it must be proportionate to the capacity of the receiving mind. Every advance in knowledge, or in goodness, or in the intuitions of beauty and grandeur offered us in nature or in art, is a further revelation of the heights and depths of the divine nature. From this point of view the very notion of development is progressive initiation. I have yet many things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now.' And if this is true within the historical development of mankind in the past, it is reasonable to suppose that the record is not closed at the present stage of attainment. Every creature, says Nietzsche, has paved the for something higher; man is but a transition figure, a rope,' as he calls it, between the beast and the superman of the future. In a nobler sense than he himself applies it, we may accept the idea of the more godlike man that is to be -just as we may give rein to our imagination and suppose such larger intelligences existing now in worlds beyond our ken. But all such acknowledgements alter nothing as to the attitude of the knower and the mode in which his knowledge is obtained. The most exalted intelligence must read, as we do, in the volume of God's works, to learn His nature: his knowledge, like ours, is through the manifestation. Though it may be truer in the sense of being ampler and more adequate, and so correcting errors and solving difficulties incident to our more limited range of vision, this is but a difference of degree, not a qualitative distinction between absolute and relative, as if the one knowledge were true and the other vitiated by some inherent defect. Our