variable;[1] yet we are shown that this _nexus_ of
reality is for ever inaccessible to consciousness. And when, once more,
we remember that the activities constituting consciousness, being
rigorously bounded, cannot bring in among themselves the activities
beyond the bounds, which therefore seem unconscious, though production of
either by the other seems to imply that they are of the same essential
nature; this necessity we are under to think of the external energy in
terms of the internal energy, gives rather a spiritualistic than a
materialistic aspect to the Universe: further thought, however, obliging
us to recognize the truth that a conception given in phenomenal
manifestations of this ultimate energy can in no wise show us what it
is.'[8]

Now, I think this is one of the passages which would justify Mr.
Bradley's well-known epigram, that Mr. Herbert Spencer has told us more
about the Unknowable than the rashest of theologians has ever ventured to
tell us about God.

{53}

Even Kant, who is largely responsible for the mistakes about Causality
against which this lecture has been a protest--I mean the tendency to
resolve it into necessary connexion--did in the end come to admit that in
the large resort we come into contact with Causality only in our own
Wills. I owe the reference to Professor Ward, and will quote the
paragraph in which he introduces it:--

'Presentation, Feeling, Conation, are ever one inseparable whole, and
advance continuously to higher and higher forms. But for the fact that
psychology was in the first instance studied, not for its own sake, but
in subservience to speculation, this cardinal importance of activity
would not have been so long overlooked. We should not have heard so much
of passive sensations and so little of active movements. It is
especially interesting to find that even Kant at length--in his latest
work, the posthumous treatise on the _Connexion of Physics and
Metaphysics_, only recently discovered and published--came to see the
fundamental character of voluntary movement. I will venture to quote one
sentence: "We should not recognise the moving forces of matter, not even
through experience, if we were not conscious of our own activity in
ourselves exerting acts of repulsion, approximation, etc." But to Maine
de Biran, often called the French Kant, to Schopenhauer, and, finally, to
our own British psychologists, Brown, Hamilton, Bain, Spencer, is
especially due th