The system projected by Herbert Spencer (born 1820), the major part of which has already appeared, falls into five parts:  First Principles, 1862, 7th ed., 1889; Principles of Biology, 1864-67, 4th ed., 1888; Principles of Psychology, 1855, 5th ed., 1890; Principles of Sociology (vol. i. 1876, 3d ed., 1885; part iv. Ceremonial Institutions, 1879, 3d ed., 1888, part v. Political Institutions, 1882, 2d ed., 1885, part vi. Ecclesiastical Institutions, 1885, 2d ed., 1886, together constituting vol. ii.); Principles of Ethics (part i. The Data of Ethics, 1879, 5th ed., 1888; parts ii. and iii. The Inductions of Ethics and The Ethics of Individual Life, constituting with part i. the first volume, 1892; part iv. Justice, 1891).  A comprehensive exposition of the system has been given, with the authority of the author, by F.H.  Collins in his Epitome of the Synthetic Philosophy, 1889.[1] The treatise on Education, 1861, 23d ed., 1890, his sociological writings, and his various essays have also contributed essentially to Mr. Spencer’s fame, both at home and abroad.  The First Principles begin with the “Unknowable.”  Since human opinions, no matter how false they may seem, have sprung from actual experiences, and, when they find wide acceptance and are tenaciously adhered to, must have something in them which appeals to the minds of men, we must assume that every error contains a kernel of truth, however small it be.  No one of opposing views is to be accepted as wholly true, and none rejected as entirely false.  To discover the incontrovertible fact which lies at their basis, we must reject the various concrete elements in which they disagree, and find for the remainder the abstract expression which holds true throughout its divergent manifestations.  No antagonism is older, wider, more profound, and more important than that between religion and science.  Here too some most general truth, some ultimate fact must lie at the basis.  The ultimate religious ideas are self-contradictory and untenable.  No one of the possible hypotheses concerning the nature and origin of things—­every religion may be defined as an a priori theory of the universe, the accompanying ethical code being a later growth—­is logically defensible:  whether the world is conceived atheistically as self-existent, or pantheistically as self-created, or theistically (fetichism, polytheism, or monotheism), as created by an external agency, we are everywhere confronted by unthinkable conclusions.  The idea of a First Cause or of the absolute (as Mansel, following Hamilton, has proved in his Limits of Religious Thought) is full of contradictions.  But however widely the creeds diverge, they show entire unanimity, from the grossest superstition up to the most developed theism, in the belief that the existence of the world is a mystery which ever presses for interpretation, though it can never be entirely explained.  And in the progress of religion from crude fetichism to the developed theology of our time, the truth, at first but vaguely perceived, that there is an omnipresent Inscrutable which manifests itself in all phenomena, ever comes more clearly into view.