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302 discussion we can hardly mistake him, and they justify my saying that they form a gigantic paradox. Mr. Spencer maintains that:

 1. The proper object of Religion is a Something which can never be known, or conceived, or understood; to which we can not apply the terms emotion, will, intelligence; of which we can not affirm or deny that it is either person, or being, or mind, or matter, or indeed anything else. 2. All that we can say of it is, that it is an Inscrutable Existence or an Unknowable Cause: we can neither know nor conceive what it is, nor how it came about, nor how it operates. It is, notwithstanding, the Ultimate Cause, the All-Being, the Creative Power. 3. The essential business of religion, so understood, is to keep alive the consciousness of a mystery that can not be fathomed. 4. We are not concerned with the question, "What effect this religion will have as a moral agent?" or, "Whether it will make good men and women?" Religion has to do with mystery, not with morals.

These are the paradoxes to which my fanaticism refuses to assent.

Now these were the views about Religion which I found in Mr. Spencer's first article, and they certainly are repeated in his second. He says: "The Power which transcends phenomena can not be brought within the forms of our finite thought." "The Ultimate Power is not representable in terms of human consciousness." "The attributes of personality can not be conceived by us as attributes of the Unknown Cause of things." "The nature of the Reality transcending appearances can not be known, yet its existence is necessarily implied." "No conception of this Reality can be framed by us." "This Inscrutable Existence which Science, in the last resort, is compelled to recognise as unreached by its deepest analyses of matter, motion, thought, and feeling." "In ascribing to the Unknowable Cause of things such human attributes as emotion, will, intelligence, we are using words which, when thus applied, have no corresponding ideas. There can be no kind of doubt about all this. I said Mr. Spencer proposes, as the object of religion, an abstraction which we can not conceive, or present in thought, or regard as having personality, or as capable of feeling, purpose, or thought—in familiar words, I said it was "a sort of a something, about which we can know nothing."

Mr. Spencer complains that I called this Something a negation, an All-Nothingness, an (xn), and an Everlasting No. He now says that this Something is the All-Being. The Unknowable is the Ultimate Reality—the solo existence;—the entire Cosmos, as we are conscious of it, being a mere show. In familiar words:—"Everything is nought, and the Unknowable is the only real Thing." I quite agree that this is Mr. Spencer's position as a metaphysician. It is not at all new to me, for it is worked out in his "First Principles" most distinctly. Ten years ago, when I reviewed Mr. Lewes's "Problems of Life and