human
If it be asked why, thinking thus, I have persevered in setting forth views at variance with current creeds, my reply is the one elsewhere made: It is for each to utter that which he sincerely believes to be true, and, adding his unit of influence to all other units, leave the results to work themselves out.
gpt
An unreflective mood, he said, is general among both cultured and uncultured, characterised by indifference to everything beyond material interests and the superficial aspects of things. ...
human
But in both cultured and uncultured there occur lucid intervals. Some, at least, either fill the vacuum by stereotyped answers, or become conscious of unanswered questions of transcendent moment. By those who know much, more than by those who know little, is there felt the need for explanation. Whence this process, inconceivable however symbolised, by which alike the monad and the man build themselves up into their respective structures? What must we say of the life, minute, multitudinous, degraded, which, covering the ocean-floor, occupies by far the larger part of the Earth's area; and which yet, growing and decaying in utter darkness, presents hundreds of species of a single type? Or, when we think of the myriads of years of the Earth's past, during which have arisen and passed away low forms of creatures, small and great, which, murdering and being murdered, have gradually evolved, how shall we answer the question--To what end? Ascending to wider problems, in which way are we to interpret the lifelessness of the greater celestial masses--the giant planets and the Sun; in proportion to which the habitable planets are mere nothings? If we pass from these relatively near bodies to the thirty millions of remote suns and solar systems, where shall we find a reason for all this apparently unconscious existence, infinite in amount compared with the existence which is conscious--a waste Universe as it seems? Then behind these mysteries lies the all-embracing mystery--whence this universal transformation which has gone on unceasingly throughout a past eternity and will go on unceasingly throughout a future eternity? And along with this rises the paralysing thought--what if, of all that is thus incomprehensible to us, there exists no comprehension anywhere? No wonder that men take refuge in authoritative dogma!
gpt
So is it, too, with our own natures. No less inscrutable is this complex consciousness which has slowly evolved out of infantine vacuity--consciousness which, during the development of every creature, makes its appearance out of what seems unconscious matter; suggesting the thought that consciousness in some rudimentary form is omnipresent. Lastly come the insoluble questions concerning our own fate: the evidence seeming so strong that the relations of mind and nervous structure are such that cessation of the one accompanies dissolution of the other, while, simultaneously, comes the thought, so strange and so difficult to realise, that with death there lapses both the consciousness of existence and the consciousness of having existed.
human
Thus religious creeds, which in one way or other occupy the sphere that rational interpretation seeks to occupy and fails, and fails the more the more it seeks, I have come to regard with a sympathy based on community of need: feeling that dissent from them results from inability to accept the solutions offered, joined with the wish that solutions could be found
gpt
It is a great thing to be constrained to recognise that a system is possible which may bring all human thought into unity, that there may be a formula which may express the law of change in all spheres where change happens, and that the universe as a whole and in all its parts forms one system. Suppose that the particular formula of Mr Spencer is inadequate, is a failure, yet is it not something worthy of recognition, that a man has lived who gave his life to the elaboration of this thought, and has so far succeeded as to make men think that such a consummation is possible and desirable? He has widened the thoughts of men, has enabled them to think in larger terms, and has done something to enable men to overcome a mere provincialism of thought. In an age of specialism he endeavoured to be universal. And such an endeavour is worthy of the highest admiration.
human
Synthetic Philosophy left most of the problems of philosophy out, but no one will deny the grandeur of his aim in seeking to present a unified system of scientific knowledge. As Prof. A. S. Pringle-Pattison has said:
gpt
It was much to hold aloft in an age of specialism the banner of completely unified knowledge; and this is, perhaps, after all, Spencer's chief claim to gratitude and remembrance. He brought home the idea of philosophic synthesis to a greater number of the Anglo-Saxon race than had ever conceived the idea before. His own synthesis, in the particular form he gave it, will necessarily crumble away. He speaks of it himself, indeed, at the close of _First Principles_ (ed. i.), modestly enough as a more or less rude attempt to accomplish a task which can be achieved only in the remote future and by the combined efforts of many, which cannot be completely achieved even then. But the idea of knowledge as a coherent whole, worked out on purely natural (though not, therefore, naturalistic) principles--a whole in which all the facts of human experience should be included--was a great idea with which to familiarise the minds of his contemporaries. It is the living germ of philosophy itself.