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Herbert Spencer's doctrine of the Unknowable is a doctrine of so much speculative importance, that it behoves all students of philosophy to have clear views respecting its character and implications. Mr.
If he is thus boldly illogical in phrase, though not in fact, may we not also speak of knowing "the unknowable"? We may, for this knowledge is the root of all other knowledge. The presence of this undifferentiated universal life-power is the final axiomatic fact to which all our analysis must ultimately conduct us.
The foolish, equivocally gifted with the quality of articulate speech, may, if they choose, satisfy their own self-love by reducing all action out of the common course to a series of variations on the same motive in others. Men blessed by the benignity of experience will be thankful not to waste life in guessing evil about unknowable trifles.
It is this assumed, but completely unknown cause of our conscious states, and of all else, that Spencer distinguishes as the Unknowable, the Unconditioned, the Absolute, etc., and which appears to have brought so much consolation to hard-pressed theists. I have no intention of discussing here the philosophic value of the "Unknowable."
Before proceeding further, an example is useful to focus some of the as yet unknowable consequences of these broader realities, changes, and trends. The deployment of American forces to Bosnia is a reaction to and representation of major shifts occurring in the post-Cold War world.
It is perfectly true that thought can never be comprehensive enough to exhaust the possibilities of existence, since it is of the essence of thinking to limit and define. But it is a sheer impossibility to think of what lies beyond the boundary of our knowledge as unknowable, so far as we think of it at all, we must conceive it as the unknown but possibly knowable.
If the half-savage Greek could share our feelings thus far, it is irrational to doubt that he went further, to find, as we do, that upon that brief gladness there follows a certain sorrow, the little light of awakened human intelligence shines so mere a spark amidst the abyss of the unknown and unknowable; seems so insufficient to do more than illuminate the imperfections that cannot be remedied, the aspirations that cannot be realized, of man's own nature.
When it ventures to touch the shield of the Unknowable, it is only with the butt of its lance, and the inevitable overthrow is accepted with the least modicum of humiliation. In that science which assumes to marshal all the others, philosophic and judicial history, ours ought to be the foremost age, if only because it has the aid of all the others.
I never doubted for a moment the existence of a Supreme Being. Nature and instinct taught me this. But who, or what, or where, this Supreme Being was, or what his attributes or characteristics were, I did not pretend to know, or care. I relegated it all to the realm of the unknown and unknowable.
"Being a deposit of the evolutive movement along its path, how could it be applied throughout the evolutive movement itself? We might as well claim that the part equals the whole, that the effect can absorb its cause into itself, or that the pebble left on the shore outlines the form of the wave which brought it." Is not that as good as saying that life is unknowable?
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