Page:Idealism and the Theory of Knowledge.djvu/10

6 and that which we know is confined to the phenomenal. Thus each of Mr. Spencer’s two conceptions, his conception of the phenomenal world with its insoluble difference, and his conception of the unknowable being which alone is real, seems to require the other as its compliment. The abstraction of the unity leaves the duality of matter and mind without any connecting link, and the equally abstract duality of mind and matter cannot be reduced to unity except by the suppression of their distinctive characters. Hence the unity and the difference cannot be regarded as both real, and if, as with Mr. Spencer, the unity is treated as real, the duality must be regarded as merely phenomenal. All our science, therefore, deals merely with appearances, which we cannot bring into relation with reality. The impulse of reason to seek for unity cannot be set aside, but, under the conditions of Mr. Spencer’s theory, it can be attained only by the sacrifice of knowledge itself. The result is instructive as pointing to the fate of all theories that set the ‘one’ against the ‘many.’ Abstract Monism and abstract Pluralism are not, strictly speaking, two philosophies but different aspects of the same philosophy. Polytheism always ends in setting up a fate beyond the gods.

The Spencerian philosophy, however, is valuable as a protest against its opposite, against any ‘too easy monism.’ It is a legitimate criticism both upon subjective idealism and upon materialism, though it only puts one one-sided theory against another, and maintains that both have equal rights. If we could not do better, it might be well to compromise upon the Spinozistic idea of the parallelism of the two unrelated attributes of extension and thought, or, upon Schelling’s conception of the balanced equality of the real and ideal factors of the universe, even though the result, as with Mr. Spencer, were to leave us without any unity which was more than a name.

We are not however, shut up to such a desperate course; for the main result of modern philosophy and especially of modern idealism has been to put a concrete, in place of an abstract unity, or, in other words, to vindicate the essential correlation of the self and the not-self. Idealism in this sense has nothing to object to the strongest assertion of the reality of the distinctions of matter and mind, or of any of the distinctions and oppositions that enter into the theoretical and practical consciousness of man. But it maintains that there are no absolute differences or antagonisms in the intelligible world, no distinctions which do not imply relations, and, therefore also, an ultimate unity between the things distinguished: and, of