Fitzgerald - Herbert Spencer's Agnosticism (1987)

Herbert Spencer's Agnosticism
Author(s): Timothy Fitzgerald

Source: Religious Studies, Vol. 23, No. 4 (Dec., 1987), pp. 477-491
Published by: Cambridge University Press
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Rel. Stud. 23, pp. 477-491
TIMOTHY FITZGERALD
London
HERBERT SPENCER'S AGNOSTICISM
In First Principles, Spencer attempted to construct a metaphysical system

which synthesized all available knowledge into a single world-view. One
major aspect of his task was to integrate Religion and Science. However,
there is no single metaphysical system or structure unifying Spencer's
thought, and my aim in this article is to identify the various different models
of reality which he confuses. Spencer inherited these different, over?
arching conceptions from his own European philosophical tradition, and with
them came certain inherent metaphysical problems which he wished to solve.
These problems have been fundamental to philosophical theology, and
indeed to all metaphysics. They include, for instance, the relation between
God and the world, and the nature of consciousness. But Spencer's views on
these questions are as shifting as are the over-lapping streams of tradition
which he wanted to unify.
Many people read First Principles (FP) as a religious work. But the Spencer
of FP is not a mystic. Despite the mystical and pantheistic origins of some of
his ideas1 they perform an intellectual and philosophical, rather than a
practical and spiritual function. Nevertheless, this intellectual concern is
based on the assumption that a proper scientific account of the world would
be incomplete unless put in the context of a metaphysical view which allows
for transcendence and mystery. But I have tried to show that the conception
of the 'Unknowable' itself takes various forms in Spencer's writing.
Spencer directly inherited from his predecessors Sir William Hamilton
and H. L. Mansel2 a confused mixture of philosophical traditions : skep?
ticism, criticism, empiricism, and intuitionism.3 Hamilton had originated
this mixture and attempted to give it formal expression in his Theory of the
Relativity of Knowledge and his Law of the Conditioned. Mansel applied
Hamilton's system, or some version of it, to Christian theology, and thus in
effect attempted a systematic Christian agnosticism. The major influences on
both of these thinkers were Hume, Kant, and Reid, though Hamilton tended
to draw on every important name in western thought to support his theories,
1 See M. Francis, The Origins of the Spencerian Philosophy and the New Reformation, Ph.D. thesis, Cam?
bridge, 1973.
2 See H. Spencer, First Principles, 5th edn., London and Edinburgh, 1887, P- xm
3 For a more detailed analysis see T. Fitzgerald, Philosophical Issues in Agnosticism Since Hume and Kant,
Ph.D. thesis, London, 1983.
47& TIMOTHY FITZGERALD
including Aristotle. Spencer tried to develop this Hamilton-Mansel tradition
in his construction of a world-view. But in this he failed, for there is no single
metaphysical structure unifying his thought. At different times he appears as
a pantheist or non-dualist, as a Kantian idealist, as an intuitionist, and as an
empiricist in the 'way of ideas' tradition. These different view-points come
and go, each fleeting structure or partial structure emerging from, then
fading into, a background in constant transition.
Spencer's most frequently employed conceptions of reality include either
one or three kinds of real entity, depending on what it is he needed to assert
at any particular stage of his argument. One of these models, which I shall
designate as (P), is a form of pantheism or non-dualism which asserts One
Reality, The Unknowable, which emanates appearances or forms or ' shows '.
These appearances are mental and material processes which are not real 'in
themselves' but only insofar as they are appearances of The Real. The other
model posits the Unknowable as The Cause of the existence of real minds
and a real material world in time and space. The latter causes impressions
and ideas to occur privately in the former. I shall call this model ?Ra, since
it posits three real entities which have real relations with each other. Some?
times, however, he substitutes this kind of dualism of mind and matter with
intuitionism which holds that the mind has an immediate and undeniable
intuition of the external object and of its own real existence. This is a less
frequent variation on the previous model and I shall refer to it as (3Rb).
In his Principles of Psychology (PP) he further confuses the internal/
external dichotomy deriving from the distinction between minds and matter
with a different kind of internal/external dichotomy based on his theory of
the evolutionary adaptation of the organism to the environment. This is a
biological and evolutionary view of the development of intelligence and
consciousness (model B). There is an insupportable strain between his ex?
pression of this view and his continued insistence on the logical gulf between
the mind and the material world.
Spencer's failure to construct a consistent metaphysical system and epis?
temology was partly due to the incompatibility between his new scientific
ideas and his reflex attachment to the old tri-partite division of the world in
terms of God, mind, and matter. His pantheism, and also the Kantian
idealism, were two of the ways he tried to resolve this dilemma.
The most important of the scientific ideas were the theory of evolution and
the law of the conservation of energy. He called the latter ' Persistence of
Force'. The most typical characteristics associated with these ideas are
process and organic change. The same fundamental energy - which he
hypostatizes as a kind of Cosmic Force - can take on different forms of life
through the process of evolution. Spencer seemed to realize that the old tri?
partite ontology, shared in different ways by Descartes, Locke, Newton, and
also by his own nineteenth-century predecessors Hamilton and Mansel, was
HERBERT SPENCER'S AGNOSTICISM 479
incompatible with these ideas. What was required was a new metaphysical
view of the world which would incorporate these new insights of energy-in
process and still make them consistent with the sense of transcendence.
This explains why model (P) is in some ways the most pervasive, though
I stress that I have abstracted this model from the text for purposes of
analysis, and that it is embedded with his other assumptions. (P) goes
something like this. The idea that reality is a process is embodied in his
theory of evolution and dissolution, which in turn is based on the concept of
Persistent Force "ever changing its manifestations but unchanged in quan?
tity throughout all past time and all future time".1 This Persistent Force is
conceived as a primary emanation from the Unknowable, a subtle energy
which transforms and evolves itself into ever more complex modes of matter,
life and consciousness. Matter and Motion are the most basic modes of
Force. Force in the mode of motion acts through Matter and gives rise to
physical, biological and mental forms. These evolutes are ' appearances ' of
the Real. Criticism proves that 'the real as we are conscious of it is not the
objectively Real'.2 We are only conscious of the appearances which are
' mere shows ' of the Real. The Real here is a synonym for The Unknowable ;
though we do have an 'indefinite consciousness' of the Real, we only have
'definite' knowledge of the transient forms which the Real manifests.
A central concern for understanding Spencer is with the meaning of
'appearances', its synonyms 'modes', 'forms', 'mere shows', and related
words and phrases such as 'emanation', 'transformation', 'participate in'.
Also sometimes expressions such as 'relative realities', 'phenomena', 'nou
mena' and 'things-in-themselves' are used, usually at a point where model
(P) is sliding into model ?Ra. Thus, for instance, the term 'relative reality'
can mean 'appearance' in the sense of model (P) ; that is, something which
has no existence in itself, no independent objective reality, but is only a
'mere show' of The Real. But it can also refer to real objects and subjects
with a limited existence in time and space, and caused to exist by The Real
(The First Cause, the Unknowable, etc.) as in models 3Ra and ?Rb.
If one first considers the context of (P) one can try to identify the sense in
which the world, or the things which make up the world, is an appearance.
One can talk about a meteor appearing in the sky, without doubting that it
really is a meteor; and one can also talk about something appearing to be
something other than it turns out to be on closer inspection. This could mean
that the meteor turned out to be a star; or it could mean that one thought
one saw a meteor but it turned out to be an illusion, a hallucination, a
product of one's imagination. In the former case something is there in?
dependent of one's imagination but it was mis-identified ; in the latter case
there is only some kind of mind-dependent image. This image has a kind of
reality, perhaps analogous to a dream-imasre, but it is not independent of the
1 First Principles, p. 552. 2 Ibid. p. 160.
480 TIMOTHY FITZGERALD
mind. One can also refer to collective hallucinations, but these are more
problematic. Whose mind do these depend on? It is conceivable that a
number of individual minds hallucinate the same image at the same time ;
or alternatively one could employ the idea of a universal mind, or a collective
unconscious.
However, Spencer's use of appearance is not quite like any of these,
because he means that everything in the world (the world as a whole) are
appearances. For Spencer, we all in principle experience the same world in
time and space, and the same things which make it up. The world is objective
in the sense that it does not depend for its existence on the imagination of any
individual or group of individuals. Nor is it a collective hallucination in the
sense that we might all be suffering from the same mistake simultaneously.
The world can be studied, described, measured etc. An added problem here
is that for Spencer individual minds are also forms, appearances, modes,
'mere shows'. Then for whom or for what is the world an appearance? And
what is the difference between saying that the world (in the sense I am
discussing) is an appearance and saying that it is real?
As though sensing the logical problems with his use of 'appearance',
Spencer at times seems to resort to Kantian Idealism. Appearances become
synonymous with phenomena, which are objective in the sense that they
conform to universal (trans-personal) conditions of experience and know?
ledge. For Kant, these conditions at their most abstract are the Forms of
Thought (Space and Time) and the categories of the understanding (in?
cluding causality, substance, number, etc.). But this Kantian view of the
world is never consistently developed, and in fact Spencer, in his move
towards some form of realism, repudiates some of Kant's fundamental stric?
tures on the limits of thought, as I shall demonstrate below.
The meaning of ' appearance ' is inevitably connected to his idea of the
relations holding between the conditioned and the unconditioned. The
following list of expressions is taken from FP :
(1) the Reality existing behind all appearances;1
(2) inscrutable things in themselves contrasted with illusive sense im?
pressions;2
(3) the Real (The First Cause, The Infinite, The Absolute) distinguished
from the phenomenal;3
(4) the Actual and the Apparent;4
(5) The noumenon and the Phenomenon;5
(6) the Reality of which they (the phenomena) are the appearances;6
(7) the Absolute and the Relative;7
(8) phenomena as manifestations of'some Power by which we are acted
upon';8
1 Ibid. p. 69. 2 Ibid. p. 69. 3 Ibid. p. 81. 4 Ibid. p. 81.
5 Ibid. p. 88. 6 ?ii/. p. 88. 7 /?irf. p. 88. 8 Ibid. p. 99.
(9) 'an inscrutable Power manifested to us through all phenomena'1;
(10) that Reality which is behind the veil of Appearance'2;
(11) ' relative reality... standing in a persistent or real relation to the
Absolute Reality'3;
Throughout chapter 5 of FP Spencer refers to the Unconditioned as the
Cause of all things; the Incomprehensible Cause; the Ultimate Cause. And
in his controversy with the sociologist Harrison4phenomena are described as
'shows' of the Ultimate Reality. This list shows that at different times
Spencer is identifying: (a) The Real, the Actual, the Noumenon, the First
Cause, the Infinite, the Absolute; the Inscrutable Power; and (b) ap?
pearances; the apparent; the phenomenal; the relative, etc.
Spencer frequently states in FP that he is offering only a symbolic picture
of reality, a purely human conception which does not constitute knowledge
of the world-in-itself Here he seems to be influenced by Kant's repudiation
of'dogmatism'. Thus he describes his 'Ultimate Religious and Scientific
Ideas' which are at the base of his system, as 'representative of the Actual'
but not cognitions. He shows how the ultimate religious ideas the Infinite,
the Absolute, the First Cause are inherently contradictory; and how the
application of the Ultimate Scientific Ideas time, space, substance, motion
and force lead to insoluble contradictions. His arguments derive from Kant,
though by way of Hamilton and Mansel, and superficially it seems as though
Spencer is following Kant in his rejection of the dogmatic fallacy that thought
can comprehend reality itself. So Spencer implicitly suggests here that his
distinction between appearance and reality is something like Kant's dis?
tinction between phenomena (the way the world appears in time and space)
and noumena (the way things are in themselves, in their real nature).
But whereas the Categories and the Regulative Ideas in Kant are ahis
torical, the inevitable products of reason in its attempt to arrive at a complete
coherence of thought, Spencer adds the idea that thought is a historical
process which evolves in step with different material and social changes. So
he says that the persistent attempts to conceive the inconceivable have been
'indispensible as transitional modes of thought'.5 There may always be a
need to give conceptual shape to the Unknowable ; the mistake lies in taking
what is merely a symbol as giving knowledge of what reality is like in itself.
To successively form such conceptions and then to reject them is a discipline
which 'may serve to maintain in our minds a due sense of the in?
commensurable difference between the conditioned and the unconditioned '.6
At times, therefore, it seems possible to read FP as though Spencer were
propounding the view that his synthetic philosophy was merely a model fit
for a stage in human evolution, a unifying set of beliefs or assumptions the
1 Ibid. p. 108. 2 Ibid. p. no. 3 Ibid. p. 167.

4 See H. Spencer and F. Harrison, The Nature and Reality of Religion: A Controversy, New York, 1885, p.
65. 5 First Principles, p. 113. 6 Ibid. p. 113.
purpose of which is to bring explanatory coherence into all concrete in?
terpretations.1 Thus rejecting the anthropomorphic notion of God2 he in?
sisted that all conceptualisations of reality are transitional, and that bringing
them to birth and then rejecting them when they cease to be appropriate for
the needs of the age are mutually necessary activities. His own concept of
world creation as an evolutionary emanation of Primary Force is not to be
taken as anything more than a fruitful method of integrating contemporary
knowledge ; and his concepts of emanation, appearance, manifestation are
subject to similar strictures as the ones he made against Theistic and other
theories of creation.3
Yet it is typical of Spencer that he should contradict this critical attitude
and attempt to establish the certainty of his initial assumptions. For instance,
when this distinction between symbols and cognitions is discussed in any
detail in relation to the status of scientific knowledge, then the critical
Kantianism evaporates. We may not know what Reality is like; nevertheless,
the unknown world is progressively disclosed by science, and it corresponds
both to our basic categories and to our scientific knowledge. One example
of this contradiction is that Spencer never questions the logical status of his
doctrine of evolution. It permeates his thinking so completely that even at
the very moment that he is denying our ability to know Reality, as dis?
tinguished from appearances or the relatively real, he is explaining this
realisation of our limitations as the result of evolution. He claims, for in?
stance, that science, by progressively stripping religion of its false conceptions
of the universe, as a consequence forces religion to state the real truth that
Reality is unknowable. But this very concept involves a contradiction ; that
on the one hand the Real is the Unknowable, yet on the other hand science
is 'a continuous disclosure, through the intelligence with which we are
endowed, of the established order of the universe \4 His picture of the gradual
shedding of false conceptions contained in religious forms of expression5 and
the simultaneous acquisition of truthful, scientific ones, strongly suggests the
assumption that scientific knowledge, itself an extension of common sense, is
of the world as it objectively is in itself, that there is a correspondence between
ideas and 'external' reality.
This contradiction can be seen in his handling of the notion of the un?
conditioned, which is both an area logically beyond thought, and sometimes
also that which science, through evolution, progressively discloses - though
in practice this will never be complete because the area is infinite in
extent.6 The confusion here is whether what is 'beyond' knowledge is in
principle unknowable or not.
Science discloses relative reality, and simultaneously purges religion of its
false knowledge claims. 'A religious creed,' Spencer says, 'is definable as a
1 Ibid. p. 552. 2 Ibid. pp. 111-13. 3 Ibid. p. 558.
4 Ibid. p. 20. 5 /???. p. 68, 103. 6 Ibid. p. 16/17.
theory of original causation' ;* but inevitably it is a false theory. Understood
in this way as essentially explanatory, all forms of religion are false - ani?
mism, polytheism and monotheism are the stages which he cites. But Spen?
cer's uncritical handling of the concept of evolution in this context leads him
into striking examples of circularity :
Grant that among all who have passed a certain stage of intellectual development
there are found vague notions concerning the origin and hidden nature of sur?
rounding things; and there arises the inference that such notions are necessary
products of progressing intelligence.2
Religion is not, however, completely false, for at the heart of all these
erroneous theories there is a concealed reference to the Unknowable. The
Unknowable is 'the soul of truth contained in erroneous creeds' whose
relation to these creeds is itself a mystery.3 Science, in its evolutionary
development towards greater truth, confirms this soul of truth while paring
away the superstitious "disfiguring vestments" whereby ignorant societies
have attempted to give it expression. Connected, then, to the evolutionary
assumption is another assumption that all religions of whatever stage of
evolutionary development are attempting to give expression to the One
Unknowable Reality. But this raises the question, which unknowable reality?
For if religion is defined as a pseudo-scientific attempt to explain the nature
of the world and its contents, a world which science is itself progressively
disclosing, then surely religion must disappear? The answer is that Spencer
has two concepts of religion. One is false religion which science exposes. The
other is true religion which has as its object a different sphere from science,
the sphere of the Unknowable which corresponds to the most abstract of all
categories.
Both of Spencer's concepts of religion are of a response to a reality which
is ultimately a mystery, but the kind of mystery shifts from being that which
is logically beyond knowledge, and therefore should not be anthro
pomorphised;4 to that which science progressively reveals. The idea of an
evolutionary transition from superstition to true religion led Spencer to a
partially critical assessment of belief, in the sense that reality itself cannot be
known, and that all attempts to conceive reality should be understood as
'transitional modes of thought'. But though Spencer conceded that his own
model of reality was itself a mere transitional stage to something higher, his
admission, had he made it unambiguously, would still be difficult to take
seriously. For the critical implications of his theory, that ultimate religious
and scientific ideas are mere symbols whereby societies make sense of their
environment and draw the boundaries of their experience, while ack?
nowledging the unknown reality presupposed by that experience, are con?
tradicted by the persistent and dogmatic strain of evolutionism which
Ibid. p. 43. 2 Ibid. p. 13.
Ibid. p. 13. 4 Ibid. pp. 41-5, 108/9.
portrays intellectual progress as an undressing, a d?mystification in which
theological accretions are one by one removed, and substituted by scientific
truths.
It is his notion of scientific truth which brings me back to Spencer's realism.
I've mentioned two senses of'unknown' in Spencer; one the logical Kantian
sense, and the other the evolutionary sense, which is not a question of logic
but of progressive disclosure, of discovery. But there are two other rather
different senses in which the real world is logically unknown for Spencer.
One is that the world is 'external' to the mind, and that therefore all we can
know is our own impressions and ideas. The other is that there are realities
of which we have a certain intuition, an intuition more fundamental than
knowledge. Thus in every act of consciousness we intuit both our own
existence and the existence of the object of consciousness. This intuition is
presupposed by all knowledge, and makes knowledge possible. Spencer
sometimes describes this as belief.1 This intuitionism is more characteristic of
the earlier essay The Universal Postulate, and the 'way of ideas' position is
more characteristic of FP. However, in his discussion of the ultimate scientific
ideas it is not always clear which view he is applying.
What in general is clear is that Spencer argues both that space, time,
matter, motion and force are inconceivable and incognisable ; and that they
exist as objective realities independent of the mind just as we suppose them
to. He uses Kantian arguments (probably taken from Hamilton and Mansel)
to show the inconceivability of these concepts as referring to real existents;2
but he also argues that these concepts actually correspond with what is in
fact there. For instance, Spencer adduces traditional arguments to show that
matter is inconceivable both as infinitely divisible, and as made up from
ultimately indivisible particles.3 These arguments lead him to conclude that
'Matter, then, in its ultimate nature, is as absolutely incomprehensible as
Time and Space. Frame what suppositions we may, we find on tracing out
their implications that they leave us nothing but a choice between opposite
absurdities'.4 But despite these logical absurdities, science reveals to us that
the world is, in fact, made up of real indivisible particles on the Newtonian
model.
Spencer's resort to the term 'relative reality' to describe Matter here5
illustrates the point that he is conceiving the world, at least in these passages,
as being something other than an appearance of Reality. That is to say, the
world as appearance is not merely a 'show' or 'form' of the Unknowable,
but is real in its own right. This is further born out by his claim that matter
as a relative reality is in a 'real relation to the absolute reality', a relation
which implies an ontological distinction between the conditioned and the
1 See H. Spencer, 'The Universal Postulate', Westminster Review, iv (1853), 513-50; also see 'Hamilton
v Mill', Fortnightly Review, 1, (1865), 531-50.
2 First Principles, pp. 47, 50-4, 68. 3 Ibid. pp. 50-4.
4 Ibid. p. 54. 5 Ibid. p. 167.
unconditioned, between the knowable and the Unknowable. Here the Un?
knowable is a separate entity underlying the real material world in time and
space, and causing the latter to exist. Here model (P) has given way to model
(?Ra), though his discussion of the relation of Matter to Force, and of Force
to the Unknowable, to some extent obscures this shift.1
Because Spencer is unclear in his own mind which model to use, there is
as a result a proliferation of levels of reality :2 the Unknown in itself; the
Unknown in its primary manifestation Force; the objective material world
in time and space; and the impressions and ideas which constitute our
private, subjective experience. There are also things-in-themselves, which in
Kant are called noumena. Is the noumenon identical with the Unknowable
(The First Cause, the Infinite, the Absolute, etc.)? Or are the noumena
(things-in-themselves) identical with the things which give rise to impressions
and ideas, things which are themselves caused to exist by 'an Unknown
Cause' and which are sometimes called phenomena?
This elaborate cosmology mystifies the reader about Spencer's own view
of the ontological status of minds and the material world. Sometimes he talks
in pantheistic, almost mystical tones about the manifestation of minds and
matter from their common unknowable progenitor. Here duality is an ap?
pearance of the One, allpervading Real. Sometimes one wonders if Spencer
is advocating a kind of psycho-physical parallelism.3 At other times there is
the conventional way-of-ideas empiricism, though placed in an evolutionary
context. In addition Spencer trails quasi-Kantian terminology and anti
dogmatism across his text.
Spencer argues that the relations existing between ideas corresponds to the
relations existing between external objects.4 By placing this correspondence
theory in an evolutionary context - mental life adapting through generations
to the external environment ? Spencer hoped to reconcile Locke's em?
piricism with the a priorism of Kant. All knowledge is derived from ex?
perience; and the basic categories of thought are caused to occur in the mind
by experience ; but they then become part of the biological structure of the
race and are genetically inherited.5 This picture of an evolutionary adap?
tation of mind to external reality is based on the familiar notion that ' the
agencies acting upon us', which are the properties of external objects,
produce effects in us or cause us to have impressions in our private mental
space.
But there are three alternative accounts of mind in Spencer's writing.
There is a form of intuitionism, also called natural or common sense realism,
most clearly expounded in the earlier essay The Universal Postulate
(UP).6 Like the 'way-of ideas' model, the mind and the external world are
1 Ibid. p. 169. 2 See, for instance, p. 171. 3 Ibid. p. 171.

4 Ibid. p. 84. 5 Ibid. p. 179.
6 H. Spencer, 'The Universal Postulate', Westminster Review, iv (1853), 513-50.
metaphysically distinct and cannot be reduced to each other. But the mind,
instead of being confined to the stream of impressions and ideas which are
its contents, and to an inference about external objects causing these im?
pressions and ideas, instead has an immediate and certain intuition of both
the subject and the object. I have argued elsewhere that there is considerable
confusion in Spencer's writing whether our intuition of our own minds is
more, less, or equally certain as our intuition of the object.1
There is also a process view of the self, similar to that implied by Hume's
sceptical analysis of the mind, whereby the self simply is the series of im?
pressions and ideas. For instance, in one place in UP he rejects the claim that
the negation of the mind as a permanent individual entity is inconceivable;
the self can be conceived as a process constituted by psychic states, rather
than as a substance undergoing modifications.2 And this view is more clearly
expressed in PP, for instance when he says :
Considered as an internal perception, the current illusion respecting the will consists
in supposing that at each moment the Ego is something more than the aggregate of
feelings and ideas actual and nascent, which then exists.3
The Idea of the self suggested here would be consistent with Spencer's claim
in UP that it is impossible to deny one's own existence if such a denial is
analogous to denying pain when one is having pain.4 The point about such
an analogy, however, is that the necessity of affirming pain while one is
having pain establishes no permanent entity enduring through time. All it
establishes is a state of pain at a particular moment. Analogously, the
necessity of affirming one's own existence at any particular moment, est?
ablishes nothing more than that, at that particular moment the pyschic
states are occurring. No permanent mind or self as subject of these states is
established.
If this were Spencer's consistently held view (which it clearly is not), then
his problem would be to explain (a) the relation of the psychic process to the
world process in general ; and (b) the particular distinction which he makes
here between the psychical self and the physical self. The idea of the ex?
ternality of the world impressing itself on an interior mental substance is
problematic enough. But if there is no mental substance, then what is the
world external to? Further, the distinction between the psychical and the
physical collapses, because the physical can simply be reduced to the im?
pressions which are occurring. One ends up with a form of neutral monism.
Elsewhere Spencer denies Hume's scepticism of minds and matter. 5
Finally, there is a biological and evolutionary view, given in PP, which
explains consciousness as the organism's increasing sensitivity to its en
1 See T. Fitzgerald, Philosophical Issues in Agnosticism since Hume and Kant, Ph.D. thesis, London, 1983,
p. 269 passim. 2 First Principles, p. 541.
3 Quoted in W. B. Greene, The Facts of Consciousness and the Philosophy of H. Spencer (Boston, 1871),
p. 7. 4 Universal Postulate, p. 521. 5 First Principles, pp. 64/5.
vironment, and identifies psychic states with changes in the nervous
system.1 Here he introduces a different sense to the expressions 'external
world' and 'environment'. It should be stressed here that, despite his de?
tailed presentation of the latter view, he also continues to assert an un?
bridgeable gulf between mind and matter, between ego and non-ego. He
says that though there is ' a fundamental connection between nervous chan?
ges and physical states',2 nevertheless physiological or physical facts can
never be translated into psychical facts. Later, as though emphasizing the
solipsism inherent in this dualism, he asserts that ' The thoughts and feelings
which constitute a consciousness... are absolutely inaccessible to any but the
possessor ofthat consciousness'3 and gives this as a reason why 'subjective
psychology' deals with a unique range of facts out of reach of the rest of the
sciences. The other sciences, such as physics and physiology, deal with
objective facts.
Now by 'objective facts' Spencer here means 'the visible world', for in his
chapters on the physiology of the nervous system he has 'formulated his
descriptions in terms of matter and motion...' which can in principle be
observed.4 His identification of the 'objective world' with the 'visible world'
is in contradiction to the dualism of mind and external world in which the
visible world (like the audible, tactile and olfactory worlds) would be con?
stituted by subjective impressions and ideas. So the contrast between sub?
jectivity and externality now changes from a logical distinction between
subjective internal states and inferred external material causes to a different
kind of distinction in which the subject, the Ego, the 'internal', is identified
with feelings, and the objective, the non-ego, the 'external' is identified with
the visible. Spencer therefore turns his attention from 'nervous phenomena
formulated in terms of Matter and Motion' to 'nervous phenomena as
phenomena of consciousness. The changes, which, regarded as modes of the
Non-Ego, have been expressed in terms of motion, have now, regarded as
modes of the Ego, to be expressed in terms of feeling. Having contemplated
these changes on their outsides, we have to contemplate them on their
insides'.5
There is at least implied here a logical distinction between visual per?
ceptions and feelings, which previously Spencer had led the reader to believe
both had the same status as kinds of impressions (as with Hume). But now,
whereas feelings are subjective, and can only be known by the individual
who has them, perceptions are objective in the sense that the visible world
is outside the Ego. Here we are in immediate cognisance of the environment.
This shift in the meaning of internal and external has not yet changed
completely to 'internal and external to the organism', because one's own
perceived body is still in one sense external to one's own consciousness. I
1 H. Spencer, Principles of Psychology, vol. i, 2nd edn. (London and Edinburgh, 1878), p. 98 passim.
2 Ibid. p. 129. 3 Ibid. p. 140. 4 Ibid. p. 98. 5 Ibid. p. 98.
interpret Spencer to mean by this that one's own body is now subjective
insofar as one feels one's own body (and this is logically private) but is
objective insofar as one can see one's own body as an objective phenomenon.*
Despite Spencer's continual insistence that ' the distinction between Sub?
ject and Object... is itself the consciousness of a difference transcending all
other differences',2 his contradiction of this dualism becomes progressively
conclusive. He shows how the development of consciousness depends on the
evolutionary development of the nervous system, a development which
passes from ' primordial organisms ' which are ' homogeneous ' and charac?
terised by a 'complete community of actions', and which 'exhibit no dif?
ferentiations of structure of function'. He concludes from this that the 'two
great divisions of life... are, in the beginning, one'.3 Spencer also expresses
this increasing differentiation between the mental and the physical as a
distinction between voluntary and automatic actions, or between conscious
and unconscious.
His evolutionary description of the differentiation between matter and
mind from their common progenitor marks the full transition in the meaning
of the internal/external distinction. Spencer identifies the increasing sen?
sitivity of the skin of the organism as the locus of origin of the psyche: 'The
skin, then, being the part immediately subject to the various kinds of external
stimuli, necessarily becomes the part in which psychical changes are ori?
ginated. As contrasted with the contained substance, it comes to be more
especially concerned in that adjustment of inner to outer relations which
constitutes intelligence'.4 It should be noted here that 'external' means
external to the organism, and he goes on to describe the development of
specialised senses on the surface of the organism as the basis for the devel?
opment of intelligence. These senses receive 'impressions' from the external
world ; there follows an unbroken succession of nervous changes which pass
through the centre of communication which has developed within the or?
ganism to co-ordinate them.5 At this point the meaning of external and
internal is quite different from the dualism of mind and matter.
I have tried in this article to analyse the logical connections between key
concepts in Spencer's system ; and to show that actually he has a number of
different systems between which he failed to distinguish. Many of the logical
problems which I have identified in Spencer's thought can be found anyway
in the classical expositions from which, consciously or unconsciously, he
derived his own ideas. For instance, the difficulties in his account of the
relation between the world and the Unknowable are similar to those found
both in traditional Theistic accounts of creation, and also in the pantheistic
system of Spinoza. What is perhaps unique to Spencer is the way he has
1 This reading of Spencer is born out by his description of the complicated process of inference necessary
to establish "the connection between nervous action and feeling'', Ibid. p. ioo.
2 Ibid. p. 157. 3 Ibid. p. 399. 4 Ibid. pp. 400/1. 5 Ibid. pp. 402/3.
compounded these problems by muddling them together. The same general
point applies to the problem of the nature of the mind and its relation to the
world, for instance as exemplified in the 'way of ideas' tradition which
Hume inherited from Locke and which came up again in a different form in
the logical positivism earlier this century ; and in the common sense realism
of Reid which is held in a more sophisticated form by some philosophers
today.
It could be argued that some development of Kant's philosophy, had
Spencer consistently applied it, might have resolved some of these issues. In
particular, a strict adherence to Kant's critical view of the possibilities of
knowledge, and the general kind of distinction which Kant made between
appearance and reality, might have opened the way to the kind of agnos?
ticism which is implied in Spencer's notion of the Unknowable. Admittedly
there are real difficulties with Kant's philosphy as it stands. It is difficult to
understand whether Kant thought of the world-in-itself as an entity or a
series of entities having a real existence at all, and in what sense God is an
additional entity or merely a heuristic device. It is not clear whether Kant
really believed that there are individual minds (even though we cannot
know them in this life), or whether he meant strictly that distinctions ac?
cording to substance, number and identity, which are categories of the
understanding, are only phenomenal, and thus only real as far as ap?
pearances are real. Furthermore, Kant's specification of the necessary con?
ditions of knowledge comes close to characterizing an essential nature of
mind, which contradicts his claim that the mind as something more than its
contents cannot be known and can only be postulated for practical reasons.
It is, however, conceivable that Spencer might have successfully adapted
the Kantian system to the conditions of his own age, and to his own scientific
and epistemological needs. For instance, Spencer's insistence that his own
systems is merely a symbolic picture for interpreting and organizing the
givenness or appearance of the world owes something to Kant's distinction
between appearance and reality. But Spencer goes further by acknowledging
that such symbolic representations change according to the needs of different
societies in different ages. They are not static and inherent features of the
real. Many of the logical problems which I have identified in Spencer's
philosophy take on their urgency because, at other times, he claims to be
describing the world as it actually is.
As an example, his description of the differentiation between the physical
and the psychical, freed from the assumption of a real dualism, would be
useful and intelligible. To describe certain processes as mental or physical
would be metaphorical. It would be, for instance, to distinguish between
processes which appear to be characterized by relations of both squence and
co-existence, from processes which appear to be characterized by relations of
sequence only. This is, in fact, precisely how Spencer does distinguish be
tween mental and physical events when he is describing the increasing evo?
lutionary differentiation between them.1 That he is describing the devel?
opment of a conceptual distinction is suggested by his observation that
conscious thought is an increasingly specialized form of feeling, that the
distinction between conscious and unconscious is not absolute, since the
subject is constituted by a whole range or gradation of conscious and un?
conscious events. At one end of the gradated scale these appear as simul?
taneous and successive; at the other end as successive only.
This kind of approach might also have offered a more plausible resolution
to the religion and science problem. The unbridgeable distinctions between
these disciplines or spheres of interest were perpetuated in Spencer's thought
by his definition of them in terms of two distinct spheres of reality to which
each was supposed respectively to refer. The strain of realism which he
inherited, dogmatic in the Kantian sense, led him to posit the Unknowable
as some separate, underlying entity causing the existence of the real world
(models ?Ra and ?Rb). On this or these models it was the special task of
religion to concern itself with the Unknowable, and of science to describe the
material world in time and space. Religion, having shed its pseudo-scientific
pretensions, would leave truth to science proper, and content itself with the
bare assertion of the reified unconditioned object.
Yet, given Spencer's own concern with social and cultural evolution, he
might have treated these differences between religion and science as con?
ventions, as the contingent result of the development of different ways of
looking at the world, rather than as knowledge systems defined by their
relation to different realities. This would have been consistent with model P,
taken as a model ; that is, as a heuristic device or framework which allows for
the integration of the new dynamic scientific concepts with the religious
apprehension of the world as being more than it appears to be. This is an
apprehension of the world as having a transcendent dimension which cannot
be reduced to any particular description of it. This would not, and did not,
satisfy the religious imagination of traditional Christianity. But Spencer was
not claiming to speak as a Christian; and besides, there were genuinely
religious sources to his pantheism, and many people did in fact treat First
Principles as containing genuinely religious ideas.
Without the assumption that the Unknowable is some sphere beyond or
behind or distinct from the world as it appears to the prevailing ethos of
science or common sense; and without the assumption that there must be
some essential distinction between subject and object; then the world would
be free to be observed and described in the way it appears to be. Science
would be possible, though freed from the value-laden assumption that scien?
tific descriptions correspond to reality as it is in itself, existing independently
of the constructions of thought. The problems about whether consciousness
1 Ibid. p. 396.
should be reduced to matter, or matter to consciousness, would be resolved
in a manner consistent with Spencer's own wishes; that is, by the realization
that the opposition between mind and matter is itself a thought construction.
Put in Spencer's language, they are forms or appearances of Primary Force,
which itself is neither matter nor mind, but something unknown which is
more fundamental than such conceptions, though presupposed by them:
'...he who rightly interprets the doctrine contained in these pages, will see
that neither of these terms can be taken as ultimate... the one is no less than
the other to be regarded as but a sign of the Unknown Reality which
underlies both'.1 These are the final words of First Principles.
1 First Principles, p. 559.

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Fitzgerald - Herbert Spencer's Agnosticism (1987)

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Herbert Spencer's Agnosticism

Author(s): Timothy Fitzgerald

HERBERT SPENCER'S AGNOSTICISM

In First Principles, Spencer attempted to construct a metaphysical system

1 Ibid. p. 108. 2 Ibid. p. no. 3 Ibid. p. 167.

1 Ibid. p. 169. 2 See, for instance, p. 171. 3 Ibid. p. 171.

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