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Updated: May 10, 2025
Nature herself is subject to this inwardness of art; at first merely objective as a condition, and usually a hostile, or at least dangerous, condition of human life, she becomes the witness to omnipotent power in illimitable beauty and majesty, its infinite unknowableness, and its tender care for all creatures, as in the Scriptures; and at last the words of our Lord concentrate, in some simple flower, the profoundest of moral truths, that the beauty of the soul is the gift of God, out of whose eternal law it blossoms and has therein its ever living roots, its air and light, its inherent grace and sweetness: "Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they toil not, neither do they spin: and yet I say unto you that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.
There is no material preparation to be made for this journey of mine into a far country a simple fact which adds to the 'unknowableness' of the other side. Do I travel alone, or am I one of a great company, swift yet unhurried in their passage?
The sun of Art falls in a kind of twilight upon his soul, working obscurely in words, and then does he most know the Unknowable when, in the passion of self-imposed ignorance, he rises to a kind of eloquence in proclaiming its unknowableness.
For, if the substance is eternal and unknowable and unchangeable, it is tantamount to nothing. Nothing can be nearer non-existence than eternal unknowableness and unchangeableness. If, on the other hand, the substance changes, then it is not unknowable, or uncognisable, for by cognising its changes we cognise it. Changes are the only things that we can cognise.
Strangely, deliberately ignorant of women, they argue that their ignorance is justified by an innate unknowableness of the sex. I am persuaded that the time is at hand when this sentimental, half contemptuous attitude of half the population towards the other half will have to be abandoned.
If we may judge of the rest of the work by these Hebrew fragments, we should say that philosophy was not Ibn Ezra's forte. Accordingly the Hebrew selections consist of little more than a string of quotations on the transcendence and unknowableness of God, on the meaning of philosophy, on the position of man in the universe, on motion, on nature and on intellect.
That which continually impelled Kant, in spite of his proclamation of the unknowableness of things in themselves, to form ideas about their character, was the moral interest, but this sometimes threw its influence in favor of their commensurability with phenomena and sometimes in the opposite scale.
In brief, "unknowableness" is not a property or quality by which a thing may be apprehended; it is a name for complete mental vacuity. It does not refer to the thing itself, it refers only to us. It is a pure negation which Spencer, by sheer verbal play converts into a quasi-positive conception. A consciousness of things unknown can never be more than a consciousness of ignorance.
Conflicts only arise when one trespasses on the other's department, and a recognition of the true line of demarcation effectually reconciles these hitherto hostile forces. A very obvious criticism of number one is in affirming a consciousness of an "Unknowable," its quality of unknowableness is annihilated.
Spencer's own later work shows that his declaration, that the absolute which lies behind the universe is unknowable, is to be taken with considerable qualification. It is only a relative unknowableness which he predicates. Moreover, before Spencer's death, the doctrine of evolution had made itself profoundly felt in the discussion of all aspects of life, including that of religion.
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