University of Virginia Library

6. Postscript to Part I

OF multitudinous criticisms made on the preceding five chapters since the publication of First Principles in 1862, it is practicable to notice only those of chief importance. Even to do this would be impracticable were it not that most of them are essentially the same and may be met by the same answers.

Several opponents have contended that it is illegitimate to assert of the Ultimate Reality lying behind Appearance, that it is unknown and unknowable. The statement that it is unknowable is said to assume knowledge greater than we can have: alike as putting an arbitrary limit to possible human faculty and as asserting something concerning that of which we are said to know nothing: a contradiction.

To the first of these objections, that an arbitrary limit is put to possible human faculty an answer has already been given in §24, where it has been shown that knowledge involves the three elements, Relation, Difference, Likeness; and that unconditioned existence, of which no one of these can be affirmed without contradiction, consequently does not present a subject-matter for knowledge. Further, in the next section it was pointed out that in the process of knowing there is the same implication. Thinking being relationing, no thought can express more than relations. From which truth it is inferable that human faculty must become fundamentally unlike what it is, and knowledge must become something other than what we call knowledge, before anything can be known about the Unconditioned.

The second objection is not thus easily met. It is doubtless true that saying what a thing is not, is, in some measure, saying what it is; since if, of all possible assertions respecting it, one is cancelled, the cancelling, by diminishing the number of possible assertions, implies an incipient definition. A series of statements of what it is not, excluding one possibility after another, becomes eventually a line of exclusions drawn round it — a definition of it. The game of Twenty Questions illustrates this. Hence it cannot be denied that to affirm of the Ultimate Reality that it is unknowable is, in a remote way, to assert some knowledge of it, and therefore involves a contradiction.

This extreme case, however, does but serve to bring out the truth that, limited as our intelligence is to the relative, and obliged as we are to use words which have been moulded to it, we cannot say anything concerning the non-relative without carrying into our propositions meanings connoted by those words — meanings foreign to a subject-matter which transcends 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. This inability of the thinking faculty in presence of the Unconditioned, is shown not only by the self-contradictory nature of its product, but also by the arrest of its process before completion. In attempting to pass the limit it breaks down before it has finished its first step. For since every thought expresses a relation — since thinking is relationing — thinking ceases when one of the two terms of a relation remains blank. As the relation is incomplete there is no thought properly so called: thought fails. So that we cannot rightly conceive even a connexion between noumenon and phenomenon. We are unable in any consistent way to assert a Reality standing in some relation to the Apparent. Such a relation is not truly imaginable.

And yet by the very nature of our intelligence we are compelled continually to ascribe the effects we know to some cause we do not know — to regard the manifestations we are conscious of as implying something manifested. We find it impossible to think of the world as constituted of appearances, and to exclude all thought of a reality of which they are appearances. The inconsistencies in the views set forth are in fact organic. Intellectual action being a perpetual forming of relations between the states from moment to moment passing, and being incapable of arresting itself, tends irresistibly to form them when it reaches the limit of intelligence. The inevitable effect of our mental constitution is that on reaching the limit thought rushes out to form a new relation and cannot form it. A conflict hence arises between an effort to pass into the Unknowable and an inability to pass — a conflict which involves the inconsistency of feeling obliged to think something and being unable to think it.

And here we come as before to the conclusion that while it is impossible for us to have a conception, there yet ever remains a consciousness — a consciousness of which no logical account can be given, but which is the necessary result of our mental action; since the perpetually-foiled endeavour to think the relation between Appearance and Reality, ever leaves behind a feeling that though a second term cannot be framed in thought yet there is a second term. This distinction, here emphasized as it was emphasized in §26, my critics have ignored. Their arguments are directed against one or other elements in a conception which they ascribe to me: forgetting that, equally with them, I deny the possibility of any conception, and affirm only that after all our futile attempts to conceive, there remains the undefinable substance of a conception — a consciousness which cannot be put into any shape.

But now let it be understood that the reader is not called on to judge respecting any of the arguments or conclusions contained in the foregoing five chapters and in the above paragraphs. The subjects on which we are about to enter are independent of the subjects thus far discussed; and he may reject any or all of that which has gone before, while leaving himself free to accept any or all of that which is now to come.

When drawing up the programme of the Synthetic Philosophy, it appeared to me that, in the absence of any statement of theologico-metaphysical beliefs, the general doctrine set forth might be misconstrued; and Part I, "The Unknowable," was written for the purpose of excluding the possible misconstructions. Unfortunately I did not foresee that Part I would be regarded as a basis for Part II; with the result that the acceptance or rejection of the conclusions in Part I, would be supposed to determine acceptance or rejection of those in Part II. Very many have in consequence been prevented from reading beyond this point.

But an account of the Transformation of Things, given in the pages which follow, is simply an orderly presentation of facts; and the interpretation of the facts is nothing more than a statement of the ultimate uniformities they present — the laws to which they conform. Is the reader an atheist? the exposition of these facts and these laws will neither yield support to his belief nor destroy it. Is he a pantheist? The phenomena and the inferences as now to be set forth will not force on him any incongruous implication. Does he think that God is immanent throughout all things, from concentrating nebulae to the thoughts of poets? Then the theory to be put before him contains no disproof of that view. Does he believe in a Deity who has given unchanging laws to the Universe? Then he will find nothing at variance with his belief in an exposition of those laws and an account of the results.

March, 1899.