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VII. LETTERS ON PHILOSOPHICAL AND

SCIENTIFIC SUBJECTS

GIORDANO BRUNO

Giordano Bruno was born in 1548. He was a Dominican friar and philosopher, and was burned for heresy at Rome in 1600.

FROM The Times, JUNE 13, 1889.

Your article of to-day on the unveiling of the statue of Bruno suggests the curious reflection that the paradoxical philosophy for which he died was probably the last thought of the 30,000 persons who assembled on Sunday to do him honour. Yet amid all the wild hypotheses of monadistic pantheism there shines forth one great discovery, which of itself would suffice to give him a lofty and lasting place in the temple of fame. Bruno discovered that the fixed stars are worlds scattered at all sorts of distances in a space to which we can assign no limits. In order nowadays to form some idea of the intellectual effort and the moral courage needed to enunciate so unexpected a truth for the first time, we must return in imagination to the sixteenth century and remember that, on the one hand, Copernicus, as Bruno pointed out in the De Immenso, had retained the ancient figment of a sphere as a single receptacle in which all the fixed stars were supposed to be placed so as to be equidistant from one centre; while, on the other hand, Bruno's discovery made even the bold Kepler exclaim that The bare thought filled him with the dread of finding himself wandering in an immensity, whose limits, whose centre, and therefore, also, fixed places are denied' (Kepler, De Stella Nova in Pede Serpentarii, cap. xxi). Oxford, June 11.

224

THE INCONSISTENCY OF MR. SPENCER'S

AGNOSTICISM

Mr. William Bramwell Booth is the son of the Rev. William Booth, general of the Salvation Army. Since 1912 he has himself held this position.

Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) published 'Principles of Psychology in 1855. First Principles' appeared in 1862: it was volume I of his great exposition of his system, called Synthetic Philosophy'.

FROM The Times, DECEMBER 11, 1896.

It is natural that Mr. Bramwell Booth should point out Mr. Herbert Spencer's inconsistency on the subject of property. It is also natural that Mr. Spencer's disciples should object to Mr. Booth's conclusion that their master is therefore likely to be unsound on graver questions. But the fact is that Mr. Spencer is inconsistent in the whole basis of his philosophy.

On the one hand, he asserts that 'what we are conscious of as properties of matter, down to its weight and resistance, are but subjective affections produced by agencies unknown and unknowable. All the sensations produced in us by environing things are but symbols of actions out of ourselves, the natures of which we cannot even conceive.' On the other hand, he asserts that there is an undefinable consciousness which stands for a mode of being beyond sensation . . . of something which resists'; and that the force of which we assert persistence is that absolute force of which we are indefinitely conscious as the necessary correlate of the force we know'.

According to these extracts from the most fundamental doctrines of First Principles and Principles of Psychology, Mr. Spencer, after asserting that all the properties of matter of which we are conscious, including resistance, are but subjective affections, nevertheless inconsistently admits that two of these properties, resistance and persistence, belong to

objective agencies; and, after asserting that these objective agencies are unknown and unknowable, positively lays down that they are not only agencies, but are also resistant and persistent. No man, it seems, knows the world beyond himself, yet Mr. Spencer, though a man, can tell what it is! But if he has a right to say that it is resistant and persistent, the man of science has a right to say that it is a world of bodies moving one another in space and time, and the man of religion has a right to speculate on the cause of this world of moving bodies. Hume, the consistent agnostic, left only 'a certain unknown, inexplicable something as the cause of our perceptions; a notion so imperfect that no sceptic will think it worth while to contend against it'. But the moment Mr. Spencer presumes to say that it is something resistant and persistent, agnosticism is at an end.

Mr. Spencer is an inconsistent thinker, because, without a previous analysis of scientific knowledge, he has attempted a synthetic philosophy after the model of the a priori school. Like Hegel, he drops many suggestive thoughts by the way; but his system is unsound. Nowadays, as Mr. Bramwell Booth remarks, these things are not entirely academic'. Crude philosophies are fast becoming popular errors. Oxford, Dec. 8.

MR. SPENCER AND HIS CRITICS

FROM The Times, DECEMBER 22, 1896.

Silence gives consent. On December 11 you published a letter from me on the inconsistency of the whole basis of Mr. Spencer's philosophy. This morning there appears a letter from Mr. Spencer, dated December 16, excusing a similar inconsistency, pointed out by Mr. Bramwell Booth, by the plea that it is between different books published at

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different times, but taking no notice of the more fundamental inconsistency, which was pointed out by me, but is not capable of being thus excused, because it is published on one and the same system of synthetic philosophy at the present moment. By a curious coincidence, on the 15th, there appeared a letter from Mr. Collins, author of the Epitome of the Synthetic Philosophy, equally silent on this inconsistency, and even insinuating that I am too ignorant of evidence to be worthy of argument.

Mr. Collins proves this argumentum ad hominem by an ignoratio elenchi. He fastens on the end of my letter, where, after showing Mr. Spencer's inconsistency, I proceeded to account for it by saying that' without a previous analysis of scientific knowledge he has attempted a synthetic philosophy after the model of the a priori school'. In reply, Mr. Collins refers to some chapters in First Principles as analytic, and triumphantly exclaims that Professor Case says there is no analysis, and yet there it is!' But I do not say that there is no analysis in the synthetic philosophy; I say that there is no previous analysis of scientific knowledge before the synthetic philosophy. The analytic method would have begun by describing scientific discoveries, and proceeded to explain them by showing how sense and inference have produced science, in order to make this previous analysis a sure foundation of any subsequent synthesis. The synthetic philosophy, on the other hand, begins with hypotheses, not founded on analysis nor on any proof, and, as if they were mathematical principles, makes them premisses of synthetical deductions, ending in conclusions as hypothetical as the premisses, and so inadequate to the facts of science that Mr. Spencer soon becomes inconsistent in spite of himself. This must ever be the way with a method which is an anticipation, not an interpretation, of nature.

Force is the cardinal point of the synthetic philosophy. In the very first of the chapters, called by Mr. Collins analytic, but by Mr. Spencer himself 'ultimate scientific ideas', and in the very first paragraph on the subject of force, this synthetic philosopher begins with muscular force versus weight-e.g. in lifting a chair. Without any previous analysis, without any shadow of proof, he assumes that the force as known to us is an affection of consciousness'. Straightway, from this unproved hypothesis he synthetically deduces the equally hypothetical conclusion that we cannot attribute the force to a chair without endowing it with consciousness! It synthetically follows, no doubt, that the force of objective agencies is unknown and unknowable; if force as known to us is an affection of consciousness, then force as it exists out of our consciousness is not force as we know it. But this again hypothetical conclusion is so narrow and inadequate to the facts that Mr. Spencer becomes inconsistent. In the socalled analytic chapter on The Persistence of Force' he argues thus: Resistance and energy are the two modes of force both of which persist; but force which persists is not that force we are conscious of in our muscular efforts, for this does not persist; therefore force which persists is that absolute force of which we are indefinitely conscious as the necessary correlate of the force we know. In other words, the very objective agencies declared to be unknown and unknowable turn out to be persistent forces of resistance and energy. The synthetic philosophy in one breath says that force beyond consciousness is unknowable, and in the next breath that the persistence of this force is the ultimate universal truth.

The analytic method would simply reverse this argument. It would begin by describing the most certain principles of natural philosophy-namely, the Newtonian mechanical laws of motion and force,

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