What is Darwinism?. Charles Russell Hodge
the coexistent positions offer no resistance." (p. 166). Resistance, however, is a form of force; and, therefore, on the following page, Spencer says, "that forces standing in certain correlations, form the whole contents of our idea of matter."
When we turn from the objective to the subjective, from the external to the inward world, the result is still the same. He agrees with Hume in saying that the contents of our consciousness is a series of impressions and ideas. He dissents, however, from that philosopher, in saying that that series is all we know. He admits that impressions necessarily imply that there is something that is impressed. He starts the question, What is it that thinks? and answers, We do not know. (p. 63). He admits that the reality of individual personal minds, the conviction of personal existence is universal, and perhaps indestructible. Nevertheless that conviction cannot justify itself at the bar of reason; nay, reason is found to reject it. (p. 65). Dean Mansel says, that consciousness gives us a knowledge of self as a substance and not merely of its varying states. This, however, he says, "is absolutely negatived by the laws of thought. The fundamental condition to all consciousness, emphatically insisted upon by Mr. Mansel in common with Sir William Hamilton and others, is the antithesis of subject and object. … What is the corollary from this doctrine, as bearing on the consciousness of self? The mental act in which self is known implies, like every other mental act, a perceiving subject and a perceived object. If, then, the object perceived is self, what is the subject that perceives? Or if it is the true self which thinks, what other self can it be that is thought of? Clearly, a true cognition of self implies a state in which the knowing and the known are one—in which subject and object are identified; and this Mr. Mansel rightly holds to be the annihilation of both. So that the personality of which each is conscious, and of which the existence is to each a fact beyond all others the most certain, is yet a thing which cannot be known at all; knowledge of it is forbidden by the very nature of human thought." (pp. 65, 66).
Mr. Spencer does not seem to expect that any man will be shaken in his conviction by any such argument as that. When a man is conscious of pain, he is not to be puzzled by telling him that the pain is one thing (the object perceived) and the self another thing (the perceiving subject). He knows that the pain is a state of the self of which he is conscious. Consciousness is a form of knowledge; but knowledge of necessity supposes an intelligent reality which knows. A philosophy which cannot be received until men cease to believe in their own existence, must be in extremis.
Mr. Spencer's conclusion is, that the universe—nature, or the external world with all its marvels and perpetual changes—the world of consciousness with its ever varying states, are impressions or phenomena, due to an inscrutable, persistent force.
As to the nature of this primal force or power, he quotes abundantly and approvingly from Sir William Hamilton and Mr. Mansel, to prove that it is unknowable, inconceivable, unthinkable. He, however, differs from those distinguished writers in two points. While admitting that we know no more of the first cause than we do of a geometrical figure which is at once a circle and a square, yet we do know that it is actual. For this conviction we are not dependent on faith. In the second place, Hamilton and Mansel taught that we know that the Infinite cannot be a person, self-conscious, intelligent, and voluntary; yet we are forced by our moral constitution to believe it to be an intelligent person. This Mr. Spencer denies. "Let those," he says, "who can, believe that there is eternal war between our intellectual faculties and our moral obligations. I, for one, admit of no such radical vice in the constitution of things." (p. 108). Religion has always erred, he asserts, in that while it teaches that the Infinite Being cannot be known, it insists on ascribing to it such and such attributes, which of course assumes that so far forth it is known. We have no right, he contends, to ascribe personality to the "Unknown Reality," or anything else, except that it is the cause of all that we perceive or experience. There may be a mode of being, as much transcending intelligence and will, as these transcend mechanical motion. To show the folly of referring to the Unknown the attributes of our own spirits, he makes "the grotesque supposition that the tickings and other movements of a watch constituted a kind of consciousness; and that a watch possessed of such a consciousness, insisted on regarding the watchmaker's actions as determined like its own by springs and escapements." (p. 111). The vast majority of men, instead of agreeing with Mr. Spencer in this matter, will doubtless heartily, each for himself, join the German philosopher Jacobi, in saying, "I confess to Anthropomorphism inseparable from the conviction that man bears the image of God; and maintain that besides this Anthropomorphism, which has always been called Theism, is nothing but Atheism or Fetichism."[4]
Mr. Spencer, therefore, in accounting for the origin of the universe and all its phenomena, physical, vital, and mental, rejects Theism, or the doctrine of a personal God, who is extramundane as well as antemundane, the creator and governor of all things; he rejects Pantheism, which makes the finite the existence-form of the Infinite; he rejects Atheism, which he understands to be the doctrine of the eternity and self-existence of matter and force. He contents himself with saying we must acknowledge the reality of an unknown something which is the cause of all things—the noumenon of all phenomena. "If science and religion are to be reconciled, the basis of the reconciliation must be this deepest, widest, and most certain of all facts—that the Power which the universe manifests is utterly inscrutable." (p. 46). "The ultimate of ultimates is Force." "Matter and motion, as we know them, are differently conditioned manifestations of force." "If, to use an algebraic illustration, we represent Matter, Motion, and Force, by the symbols x, y, z; then we may ascertain the values of x and y in terms of z, but the value of z can never be found; z is the unknown quantity, which must forever remain unknown, for the obvious reason that there is nothing in which its value can be expressed." (pp. 169, 170).
We have, then, no God but Force. Atheist is everywhere regarded as a term of reproach. Every man instinctively recoils from it. Even the philosophers of the time of the French Revolution repudiated the charge of atheism, because they believed in motion; and motion being inscrutable, they believed in an inscrutable something, i.e. in Force. We doubt not Mr. Spencer would indignantly reject the imputation of atheism; nevertheless, in the judgment of most men, the difference between Antitheist and Atheist is a mere matter of orthography.
FOOTNOTES:
[3] First Principles of a New System of Philosophy. By Herbert Spencer. Second edition. New York, 1869, p. 30.
[4] Von den göttlichen Dingen, Werke, III. pp. 422, 425. Leipzig, 1816.
Hylozoic Theory.
This theory assumes the universe to be eternal. There is nothing extra, or antemundane. There is but one substance, and that substance is matter. Matter, however, has an active and passive principle. Life and rationality are among its attributes or functions. The universe, therefore, is a living whole pervaded by a principle not only of life but of intelligence. This hylozoic doctrine, some modern scientific men, as Professor Tyndall, seem inclined to adopt. They tell us that matter is not the dead and degraded thing it is commonly regarded. It is active and transcendental. What that means, we do not know. The word transcendental is like a parabola, in that there is no knowing where its meaning ends. To say that matter is transcendental, is saying there is no telling what it is up to. This habit of using words which have no definite meaning is very convenient to writers, but very much the reverse for readers. Some of the ancient Stoics distinguished between the active and passive principles in the world, calling the one mind, the other, matter. These however were as intimately united as matter and life in a plant or animal.