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He who turns to one principle of explanation will conceive the Absolute in one way, and he who turns to another will, naturally, understand something else by the word. Thus, the idealist may conceive of the Absolute as an all-inclusive Mind, of which finite minds are parts. To Spencer, it is the Unknowable, a something behind the veil of phenomena.
And in this mass of thoughts one can not find a philosophic curiosity, not one expression of anxiety about the unknowable, not an expression of fear of the mystery which surrounds destiny. At Saint Helena, when he talks of God and of the soul, he seems to be a little fourteen-year-old school-boy. Thrown upon the world, his mind found itself fit for the world, and embraced it all.
Nevertheless, according to Spencer, it is too much to conclude with the thinkers just mentioned, that the idea of the absolute is a mere expression for inconceivability, and its existence problematical. The nature of the absolute is unknowable, but not the existence of a basis for the relative and phenomenal.
He had dipped into Herbert Spencer, and talked largely of God as the Unknowable; and how could the Unknowable be supposed to take pleasure in the automatic prayers of a handful of bumpkins and clodhoppers met together in a mouldy old church, time out of mind the temple of superstitions and ceremonies.
Even metaphysics swept back over science with the green water of the deep-sea ocean and no one could longer hope to bar out the unknowable, for the unknowable was known.
The safest, indeed the only reasonable, course is that of the agnostic to leave alone the unknowable, while acknowledging its existence and its mystery, and to try to understand knowable phenomena and guide our actions accordingly. Mo Tzu and Creation He even went so far as to describe Mo Tzu and those who thought with him as "wild animals." Mencius and the First Cause
The prolonged and thousand-times repeated glorification of Unconsciousness, Silence, Renunciation, all comes to this: We are to leave the region of things unknowable, and hold fast to the duty that lies nearest. Here is the Everlasting Yea. In action only can we have certainty. The reticences of men are often only less full of meaning than their most pregnant speech; and Mr.
Answer philosopher, answer sage, answer astronomer, and we have the solution of "the riddle of the Universe." As yet the riddle still remains, the veil still hangs between the knowable and the unknowable, between the finite and the infinite. Science stands baffled like a wailing creature outside the walls of knowledge importuning for admission.
Or, to put the matter in another light, as cosmists maintain that Theism, in all the phases of its development, has been the product of a probably erroneous theory of personal agency in nature, when this theory is expressly discarded as it is by the doctrine of the Unknowable is it philosophically legitimate for cosmists to render their theory of things in terms which belong to the totally different theory which they discard?
He did not know yet just where the outmost circle of his limitations lay but he knew that it was there and that he must make no mistake when he came to it. And this, too, is true: just to the degree that the man recognized his limitations, the circle widened. Also the man came to understand that there are things knowable and things unknowable.
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