[Footnote 1:  Cf. also Fiske’s Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy, 2 vols., 1874.  Numerous critiques and discussions of Spencer’s views have been given in various journals and reviews; among more extended works reference may be made to Bowne, The Philoesophy of Herbert Spencer, 1874; Malcolm Guthrie, On Mr. Spencer’s Formula of Evolution, 1879, and the same author, On Mr. Spencer’s Unification of Knowledge, 1882; and T.H.  Green, on Spencer and Lewes, Works, vol. i.—­TR.]

Science meets this ultimate religious truth with the conviction, grasped with increasing clearness as the development proceeds from Protagoras to Kant, that the reality hidden behind all phenomena must always remain unknown, that our knowledge can never be absolute.  This principle maybe established inductively from the incomprehensibility of the ultimate scientific ideas, as well as deductively from the nature of intelligence, through an analysis of the product and the process of thought. (1) The ideas space, time, matter, motion, and force, as also the first states of consciousness, and the thinking substance, the ego as the unity of subject and object, all represent realities whose nature and origin are entirely incomprehensible. (2) The subsumption of particular facts under more general facts leads ultimately to a most general, highest fact, which cannot be reduced to a more general one, and hence cannot be explained or comprehended. (3) All thought (as has been shown by Hamilton in his essay “On the Philosophy of the Unconditioned,” and by his follower Mansel) is the establishment of relations, every thought involving relation, difference, and (as Spencer adds) likeness.  Hence the absolute, the idea of which excludes every relation, is entirely beyond the reach of an intelligence which is concerned with relations alone, and which always consists in discrimination, limitation, and assimilation—­it is trebly unthinkable.  Therefore:  Religion and Science agree in the supreme truth that the human understanding is capable of relative knowledge only or of a knowledge of the relative (Relativity).  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.  The considerations which speak in favor of the relativity of knowledge and its limitation to phenomena, argue also the existence of a non-relative, whose phenomenon the relative is; the idea of the relative and the phenomenal posits eo ipso the existence of the absolute as its correlative, which manifests itself in phenomena.  We have at least an indefinite, though not a definite, consciousness of the Unknowable as the Unknown Cause, the Universal Power, and on this is founded our ineradicable belief in objective reality.