IV
The preceding result is recognised — in fact, is proclaimed — by agnostic evolutionism itself, in its tenet of an Omnipresent Energy, whose existence it maintains as a certainty, but whose nature it declares inscrutable. This inference of some necessary noumenal Ground is the deep trait in Mr. Spencer’s doctrine, answering to the true nature of the philosophic impulse, and constituting the profoundest claim of his scheme to the title of a philosophy. But the dogma that the nature of this Ground is past finding out really means that the universal resemblance among phenomena of every order — the mysterious kinship, not only of the inorganic and the organic, but of the entire physical and physiological world and the psychic world — must be accepted as a dead and voiceless fact, a “final inexplicability,” as Stuart Mill used to say. But surely philosophy means explanation, else it is not philosophy; surely, too, a “final inexplicability” does not explain. While, then, historic philosophy, disallow as it may their theory of knowledge, goes heartily along with Mr. Spencer and his school in their metaphysics thus far, it declines to arrest its progress with them here, and pronounces that in the Something at the heart of universal phenomenal resemblance, still to be explained, but by their
