or Mr. Spencer to assure him that this
"Ultimate Reality" is higher than personal. How Mr. Spencer knows that
something, the nature of which is unknown, is higher than something
else, is more than one can tell. But that does not matter. Higher or
lower, it is all the same. Either way it is different from personal, and
if it is different it is not the same, it is not personal. Whatever
other qualities this "Ultimate Reality" has or lacks, it must have that
one if it is to be of use to the theist. And to say that it is higher
than personal is to say that it is not personal at all, and to repeat in
a roundabout manner what the Atheist has been saying all the time.

What now is Spencer's theory of an ultimate reality that must for ever
remain unknowable? Following a line of thought that had been steadily
gaining ground since Hume--although much older than Hume--Spencer holds
that in final analysis all our knowledge is a knowledge of mental states
and their relations. Beyond this we _know_ nothing, and can never know
anything. Nevertheless, while we cannot know anything beyond
consciousness, the conditions of thinking oblige us to assume that
something exists as the cause of our states of mind. Just as black
implies something that is not black, hard something that is not hard, so
we must conceive, as against the conditioned, relative existence of our
conscious states, an unconditioned, absolute existence as their cause.
It is this assumed, but completely unknown cause of our conscious
states, and of all else, that Spencer distinguishes as the Unknowable,
the Unconditioned, the Absolute, etc., and which appears to have brought
so much consolation to hard-pressed theists.

I have no intention of discussing here the philosophic value of the
"Unknowable." But one may say, in passing, that even from that point of
view Spencer is untrue to his own Agnosticism in speaking of the
Unconditioned as the _cause_ of phenomena. For causation is a category
of the conditioned, it belongs to the world we know. It is not something
that exists beyond consciousness, it is something that is supplied by
consciousness and which possesses validity only within the world of
phenomena. On Spencer's own theory of relativity a cause only exists in
relation to an effect. Destroy the one and you destroy the other. Thus,
if the Unknowable is a cause of phenomena it ceases to be the
unconditioned and becomes part of the phenomenal order. If, on the other
h