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An introduction to the philosophy of Herbert Spencer
An introduction to the philosophy of Herbert Spencer Author:William Henry Hudson Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER VI. RELIGIOUS ASPECTS OF THE SPENCERIAN PHILOSOPHY. It is a curious instance of the gratuitous perverse- ness of popular judgments, that because Mr... more ». Spencer has been careful to mark out more clearly than any preceding philosopher the limits within which, from the very constitution of our intelligence, all our knowledge must be confined, his system should therefore have been pronounced a system of negations. Thousands of pulpita from which there never yet issued a syllable about his positive contributions to thought, have rung with denunciations of his agnosticism; thousands of general readers who know nothing of the light that he has thrown upon so many of the practical problems and philosophic controversies of the day, have their own pronounced ideas of his doctrine of the unknowable—a doctrine which may indeed be said to have taken the place of the old unscientific materialism, to which Mr. Spencer has himself given the death-blow, as the red rag of the modern theological world. How strange and wayward and purblind all this is, it is hardly needful for us here to point out. The development of the doctrine in question occupies a hundred and twenty-three pages, or less than a quarter of one volume of the synthetic series—First Principles; and the chapters devoted to it represent but the clearing of the ground for constructive work, and properly form no part of the Synthetic System itself. Hence, even if we persist in treating the Absolute as a negation—which is precisely what, as we shall see, Mr. Spencer himself emphatically refuses to do—it is none the less manifest that to stigmatize the Synthetic Philosophy as merely iconoclastic, is fundamentally to misconceive its whole character and tendency. Here we will consider the Speucerian doctrine of the unknowabl...« less