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But we must make haste to add that this point of view is the one which is reached when we regard the relations of sensation with its unknown cause the great X of matter. Positive science and practical life do not take for an objective this relation of sensation with the Unknowable; they leave this to metaphysics.
That is what I think of matter, understood as the inmost structure of bodies of unknowable and metaphysical matter. I shall not speak of it again; and henceforth when I use the word matter, it will be in quite a different acceptation it will be empirical and physical matter, such as it appears to us in our sensations. It must therefore be understood that from this moment we change our ground.
It lacks nothing of the power of deity, save only that we are not assured that it created the primordial particles. The creation of these particles was a conception that for Anaxagoras, as for the modern Spencer, lay beyond the range of imagination. Nous is the artificer, working with "uncreated" particles. Back of nous and the particles lies, for an Anaxagoras as for a Spencer, the Unknowable.
Are these mountain peaks of the Unknowable, the Impassable, which encompass the skyline of our humanity, these heights so mysterious and so unscalable, not rather bulwarks between man's pride and the abyss? Something of this I said to the Butterfly Man, and he nodded, but did not answer. He fell into a brown study; then plunged from the room without further look or word and made for his own desk.
She was essentially of the truth; and therefore, when she came into relation with a soul such as Wingfold, a soul so much more developed than herself, so much farther advanced in the knowledge of realities as having come through difficulties unknown and indeed at present unknowable to Barbara, she met one of her own house, and her life was fed from his, and began to grow faster.
The Greek Atomists called it an "Inconceivable Necessity;" Anaxagoras, "The World-forming Intelligence;" Hegel, "Absolute Idea;" Spinoza, "Absolute Substance;" Schopenhauer, "Unconscious Will." Spencer finds only "The Unknowable;" Darwin's virtual Creator is "Natural Selection;" Matthew Arnold recognize a "Stream of Tendency not our own which makes for righteousness."
But if the late Herbert Spencer, apart from his synthetic philosophy of phenomena, has left any permanent mark on the religions consciousness, it has been by a consecration of the mystery of the ultimate Unknowable.
Probably man's body has not changed radically in vast cycles of time, but his mind has developed enormously since the dawn of history. Biologists are coming more and more to recognize some unknown factor in evolution, probably some unknowable factor.
But to skip any of these stages in the education or evolution of the individual seems a sore mistake. Children hedged and protected from digging in the dirt develop into "third rounders," as our theosophic friends would say, that is, educated non-comps vast top-head and small cerebellum people who can explain the unknowable, but who do not pay cash. Third rounders all fit only for the melting-pot!
Hegel was weary of Fichte's endless discussion of the ego and Schelling's of the absolute. It was not the abyss of the unknowable from which things said to come, or that into which they go, which interested Hegel. It was their process and progress which we can know. It was that part of their movement which is observable within actual experience, with which he was concerned.
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