Dear Sir:
On arriving here last week, I found the December livraison of your Biology, and I need hardly say how much I regretted the announcement in the paper annexed to it . . . . I propose that you should write the next of your treatises, and that I should guarantee the publisher against loss . . . . I beg that you will not consider this proposal in the light of a personal favor, though even if it were I should still hope to be permitted to offer it. But it is nothing of the kind—it is a simple proposal of coöperation for an important public purpose, for which you give your labor and have given your health. I am, Dear Sir,
Very truly yours,
J. S. Mill.26
Spencer courteously refused; but Mill went out among his friends and persuaded several of them to subscribe for 250 copies each. Spencer again objected, and could not be moved. Then suddenly came a letter from Prof. Youmans, saying that Spencer’s American admirers had bought, in his name, $7000 of public securities, of which the interest or dividends were to go to him. This time he yielded. The spirit of the gift renewed his inspiration; he resumed his task; and for forty years he kept his shoulder to the wheel, until all the Synthetic Philosophy had arrived safely into print. This triumph of mind and will over illness and a thousand obstacles is one of the sunny spots in the book of man.
III. First Principles
1. THE UNKNOWABLE
“We too often forget,” says Spencer at the outset, “that not only is there ‘a soul of goodness in things evil,’ but generally also a soul of truth in things erroneous.” He proposes, therefore, to examine religious ideas, with a view to finding that core of truth which under the changing form of many faiths, has given to religion its persistent power over the human soul.
What he finds at once is that every theory of the origin of the universe drives us into inconceivabilities. The atheist tries to think of a self-existent world, uncaused and without beginning; but we cannot conceive of anything beginningless or uncaused. The theist merely puts back the difficulty by a step; and to the theologian who says, “God made the world,” the child’s unanswerable query comes, “Who made God?” All ultimate religious ideas are logically inconceivable.
All ultimate scientific ideas are equally beyond rational conception. What is matter? We reduce it to atoms, and then find ourselves forced to divide the atom as we had divided the molecule; we are driven into the dilemma that matter is infinitely divisible,—which is inconceivable; or that there is a limit to its divisibility,—which also is inconceivable. So with the divisibility of space and time; both of these are ultimately irrational ideas. Motion is wrapped in a triple obscurity, since it involves matter changing, in time, its position in space. When we analyze matter resolutely we find nothing at last but force—a force impressed upon our organs of sense, or a force resisting our organs of action; and who shall tell us what force is? Turn from physics to psychology, and we come upon mind and consciousness: and here are greater puzzles than before. “Ultimate scientific ideas,” then, “are all representations of realities that cannot be comprehended . . . . In all directions the scientist’s investigations bring him face to face with an insoluble enigma; and he ever more clearly perceives it to be an insoluble enigma. He learns at once the greatness and the littleness of the human intellect—its power in dealing with all that comes within the range of experience, its impotence in dealing with all that transcends experience. He, more than any other, truly knows that in its ultimate nature nothing can be known.”27 The only honest philosophy, to use Huxley’s word, is agnosticism.
The common cause of these obscurities is the relativity of all knowledge. “Thinking being relating, no thought can express more than relations . . . . Intellect being framed simply by and for converse with phenomena, involves us in nonsense when we try to use it for anything beyond phenomena.”28 And yet the relative and phenomenal imply by their names and natures something beyond them, something ultimate and absolute. “On watching our thoughts we see how impossible it is to get rid of the consciousness of an Actuality lying behind Appearances, and how from this impossibility results our indestructible belief in that Actuality.”29 But what that Actuality is we cannot know.
From this point of view the reconciliation of science and religions is no longer very difficult. “Truth generally lies in the coördination of antagonistic opinions.”30 Let science admit that its “laws” apply only to phenomena and the relative; let religion admit that its theology is a rationalizing myth for a belief that defies conception. Let religion cease to picture the Absolute as a magnified man; much worse, as a cruel and blood-thirsty and treacherous monster, afflicted with “a love of adulation such as would be despised in a human being.”31 Let science cease to deny deity, or to take materialism for granted. Mind and matter are, equally, relative phenomena, the double effect of an ultimate cause whose nature must remain unknown. The recognition of this Inscrutable Power is the core of truth in every religion, and the beginning of all philosophy.
2. EVOLUTION
Having indicated the unknowable, philosophy surrenders it, and turns its face to what can be known. Metaphysics is a mirage: as Michelet put it, it is “the art of befuddling one’s self methodically.” The proper field and function of philosophy lies in the summation and unification of the results of science. “Knowledge of the lowest kind is un-unified knowledge; science is partially-unified knowledge; philosophy is completely-unified knowledge.”32 Such complete unification requires a broad and universal principle that will include all experience, and will describe the essential features of all knowledge. Is there a principle of this kind?
We may perhaps approach such a principle by trying to unify the highest generalizations of physics. These are the indestructibility of matter, the conservation of energy, the continuity of motion, the persistence of relations among forces (i.e., the inviolability of natural law), the transformability and equivalence of forces (even of mental and physical forces), and the rhythm of motion. This last generalization, not usually recognized, needs only to be pointed out. All nature is rhythmical, from the pulsations of heat to the vibrations of violin strings; from the undulations of light, heat and sound to the tides of the sea; from the periodicities of sex to the periodicities of planets and comets and stars; from the alternation of night and day to the succession of the seasons, and perhaps to the rhythms of climatic change; from the oscillations of molecules to the rise and fall of nations and the birth and death of stars.
All these “laws of the knowable” are reducible (by an analysis which must not here be followed in detail) to the final law of the persistence of force. But there is something static and inert about this principle; it does not so much as hint at the secret of life. What is the dynamic principle of reality? What is the formula of the growth and decay of all things? It must be a formula of evolution and dissolution, for “an entire history of anything must include its appearance out of the imperceptible and its disappearance into the imperceptible.”33
So Spencer offers us his famous formula of evolution, which made the intellect of Europe gasp for breath, and required ten volumes and forty years for its explanation. “Evolution is an integration of matter and a concomitant dissipation of motion; during which the matter passes from an indefinite, incoherent homogeneity to a definite, coherent heterogeneity; and during which the retained motion undergoes a parallel transformation.”34 What does this this mean?