Page:The Idealistic Reaction Against Science (1914).djvu/34

Rh life of the real, nothing is unknowable, since everything which we regard as real becomes a content of our consciousness the very moment we recognise its reality. Try as it may, thought cannot call its own objective value in question, and, while endeavouring to prove its own relativity, posits as the absolute term of reference something made of like substance with itself! This is proved by Spencer’s Unknowable, which in the doctrine of transfigured realism is conceived of as the cause of phenomena, as being at once single and the manifold, in its variations which correspond to empirical changes; as a substance possessed of persistent modes connected by an indissoluble relation with their conditioned effects — space, time, motion, and force. And yet it is alleged that we know nothing about it! Moreover, we are supposed to have found an absolute model of reality face to face with which thought must perforce own its impotence, as if this model were not just as much a thought! Logical activity will brook no limits, since in the very act of denning these limits it comprehends and transcends them in its universal concepts. A reality absolutely eluding thought is an epistemological absurdity; how can we affirm that it exists without thinking of it in some way?

4. First Germs of the Reaction from Intellectualism in Spencer. — If Kant, Hamilton, and Mansel pronounce the Absolute to be unknowable, it is because they wrongly restrict the circle of knowledge to abstract intelligibility; yet at bottom they too grant the possibility of a revelation of this reality in the mind of man. Hamilton writes:

By virtue of a wonderful revelation we are thus, in the consciousness of our inability to conceive anything but the relative and the finite, inspired to believe in the existence of something unconditioned beyond the sphere of comprehensible reality.

And Spencer explicitly recognises that the so-called Unknowable does not absolutely elude consciousness, but is rather presented thereto in a form differing from precise and determined thought: