Note 54 — THE MONIST.

Mr. Spencer grapples with the problem of ultimate reality from three different and widely divergent standpoints. First, by assuming that our out and out conditioned nature and knowledge presupposes the existence of an “Unconditioned Reality,” he arrives at the conception of an “Absolute Cause.” Second, by attributing—in keeping with the principle of the Conservation of Energy, all physical and psychical activity to the interconvertible play of modes of force, he arrives at the conception of an “Absolute Force,” whence all these manifest modes proceed; hinting, moreover, that, as our experience of force-manifestation is of a psychical nature, the “Absolute Force” may rather be conceived as psychical than as physical. Third, besides explaining at times that the psychical and physical modes, instead of being interconvertible, are only two different aspects of one and the same reality—and contrary to his assumption of the interconvertibility of psychical and physical modes proceeding from an Absolute Force, he advocates in his Transfigured Realism the view, that our perceptual consciousness figures representatively the corresponding characteristics of a world of things-in-themselves. No wonder that Spencerians are getting somewhat mixed, as the saying is.