ngle, involves
conceptions that cannot be brought together in consciousness, and so
dismiss it as being without meaning.

The truth is that every one of Spencer's attempts to prove the existence
of an unknowable turns out on examination to be no more than a proof of
the existence of an unknown, and this is not disputed at any time or by
anyone. Thus, after being told that a known cannot be thought of apart
from an unknown, we are informed:--

Positive knowledge does not, and never can, fill the whole region
of possible thought. At the utmost reach of discovery there arises,
and must ever arise, the question, What lies beyond? As it is
impossible to think of a limit to space so as to exclude the idea
of space lying outside that limit, so we cannot conceive of any
explanation profound enough to exclude the question, What is the
explanation of the explanation?

With this we can all agree, but it does not bring us any nearer an
"unknowable." It is perfectly true that thought can never be
comprehensive enough to exhaust the possibilities of existence, since it
is of the essence of thinking to limit and define. But it is a sheer
impossibility to think of what lies beyond the boundary of our knowledge
as unknowable, so far as we think of it at all, we must conceive it as
the unknown but possibly knowable. The unknown can only be thought of
thus because it is only as it is, by assumption, brought into line with
what is already known that it can be thought about at all. We are
compelled to think of what lies beyond the limits of our actual
knowledge in the same way as a traveller thinks of the fauna and flora
of an untravelled country. The new region may present many new features,
but until actual observation has taken place, these new features will
only be thought of as more or less unusual combinations of known animal
and vegetable life. They are substantially identical with what is
already known.

No stranger notion ever occurred to a great thinker than that religion
and science represent parallel and distinct lines of development, each
having its own sphere of operation. It is all the more remarkable when
we remember that with Spencer "religion" means all religion, past and
present, civilised and savage. And no one is more precise in pointing
out how all religious ideas find their beginnings in the conditions of
primitive life. And that being the case, one wonders whether we are to