to religious belief, and to a vague indefinite consciousness incapable of being expressed in precise concepts.
3. Criticism of Spencer’s Agnosticism. — The philosopher of First Principles goes even farther than Du Bois-Reymond, striving as he does to prove that the ultimate essence of things eludes not only scientific knowledge, but also speculative reason, and that because human knowledge can of necessity be but relative. Agnostic positivism, using as its weapons the transcendentalism of Kant, which Hamilton[1] and Mansel[2] had pressed into the service of faith, is forced back on its negative side, on the ancient forms of traditional mysticism, which, though latent, had never really perished, and was ever ready to rise again to do battle with the theological rationalism of the extreme school. In the theory of the Unknowable we see the reappearance of the mystical tendency, finding expression not in the moderate formula “Credo ut intelligam,” but rather in the blind aberration involved in “Credo quia absurdum,” since the absurd unknowable is in its ultimate analysis but the confession of the powerlessness of that rationalism which is supposed to reconcile the conflicting claims of science and theology. But, we may ask, must thought inevitably lead to such an absurd conclusion? If we examine the Unknowable closely, we shall find that it is simply something which we think or at least vaguely feel to be actual, but which we affirm that we cannot know. We must here make sure that we clearly understand in exactly what sense we use the word “know,” since it is just the arbitrary limitation of its meaning which has given rise to certain alleged antinomies.
Spencer admits no other knowledge than that which subjects fact to law, classifying it, resolving it into its abstract relations, determining in what respects it resembles other facts or differs from them; but side by side with this form of mediate knowledge which seeks the intelligible element in the phenomenon brought to its notice, there exists that immediate knowledge which consists in the direct life of conscious reality
