Note 326 — Chapter XXI · FREETHOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

It was said of Hamilton that, “having scratched his eyes out in the bush of reason, he scratched them in again in the bush of faith”; and when that could obviously be said also of his reverend pupil, the philosophic tide was clearly on the turn. Within two years of the delivery of Mansel’s lectures his and Hamilton’s philosophic positions were being confidently employed as an open and avowed basis for the naturalistic First Principles (1860–62) of Herbert Spencer, wherein, with an unfortunate laxity of metaphysic on the author’s own part, and a no less unfortunate lack of consistency as regards the criticism of religious and anti-religious positions,326 the new cosmic conceptions are unified in a masterly conception of evolution as a universal law. This service, the rendering of which was quite beyond the capacity of the multitude of Spencer’s metaphysical critics, marks him as one of the great influences of his age. Strictly, the book is a “System of Nature” rather than a philosophy in the sense of a study of the grounds and limitations of knowledge; that is to say, it is on the former ground alone that it is coherent and original. But its very imperfections on the other side have probably promoted its reception among minds already shaken in theology by the progress of concrete science; while at the same time such imperfections give a hostile foothold to the revived forms of theism. In any case, the “agnostic” foundation supplied by the despairing dialectic of Hamilton and Mansel has always constituted the most effective part of the Spencerian case.