that is in any way done. We may not know what it is; but that it is, is the most assured of all assured certainties. And when it comes to doing, what can be more dramatically positive than that which bears a name of negation? Whatever it may not be, it is the Power that drives all the machinery in this workshop of a world; it is the Power which lies at the back of such wit as man has to interpret it, and, in some measure, to utilize its mechanism.

It seems plain enough that Spencer distinguishes, or seeks to distinguish, between those knowable effects which we call natural phenomena and their Unknowable Cause or Source. And this seems to be in line with the distinction which his critic, M. Bergson, draws between 'the evolved which is a result' and 'evolution itself, which is the act by which the result is obtained'.[22] An act implies an agent, and the agency of which the evolved is a manifestation is for M. Bergson Life, while for Spencer it is that very vigorous agency—the Unknowable. Now in criticizing Spencer, M. Bergson says:

'The usual device of the Spencerian method consists in reconstructing evolution with the fragments of the evolved.... It is not however by dividing the evolved that we shall reach the principle of that which evolves. It is not by recomposing the evolved with itself that we shall reproduce the evolution of which it is the term.'[23]

But does Spencer ever suggest that we shall thus reach the principle of that which evolves—by which, if I mistake not, M. Bergson means the Source of evolution? Does he not urge that we can neither reach it in this way, nor in any other way? For M. Bergson, as for Spencer, it is unknowable by the intellect—it can only be known by what M. Bergson calls intuition. For both thinkers, the intellect provides only a world of symbols; and Spencer's transfigured realism may be matched by what Dr. Wildon Carr calls M. Bergson's transformed realism.[24] So long as we are dealing with the evolved—which is that with which alone science attempts to deal—Spencer, M. Bergson, and the rest of us are in like case. We must stumble on intellectually with our symbols as best we may. 'Whether we posit the present structure of mind or the present subdivision of matter in either case we remain in the evolved: we are told nothing of what evolves, nothing of evolution.'[25] Nothing of what evolves! Spencer might exclaim with a groan. Have I then written all those pages and pages on the Unknowable for nought? Is it not a fundamental tenet of my philosophy that there must be, and therefore is, a Source of the evolved—of the phenomenal world which is merely an expression in terms of intellectual symbolism, of that ultimate Power which, though its nature may baffle the intellect, is none the less the most real of all realities?

It would take us too far from the line of Spencer's thought to consider M. Bergson's doctrine that it is the intellect that portions the world into lots;[26] that cuts the facts out of the interpenetrating whole of reality, and renders them artificially distinct within the continuity of becoming. It suffices to note that on such a presupposition 'the cardinal error of Spencer is to take experience already allotted as given, whereas the true problem is to know how the allotment was worked'.[27] I am not prepared to give—indeed I have been unable to find—M. Bergson's own solution of the problem. I gather that it was Life itself that somehow allotted concepts and objects in such correspondence as should be practically useful though metaphysically false and illusory. But just how it was done I have still to learn. 'The original activity was', we are told, 'a simple thing which became diversified through the very construction of mechanisms such as those of the brain,'[28] which, as Life's tool, has facilitated the chopping up of a continuous interpenetrating reality into mince-meat for intellectual assimilation. Such a conception was foreign to Spencer's thought. But some of us may find it hard to distinguish M. Bergson's 'original activity' from Spencer's Unknowable, which, so far as one can make out, somehow produced precisely the same results. As a matter of fact, M. Bergson seems to put into Life, as Spencer put into the Unknowable, the potentiality of producing all that actually exists.

For Spencer, as for M. Bergson, we live in a world of change. But neither is content to accept changes as facts to be linked up within a scheme of scientific interpretation. Both must seek their Source. Now to inquire into the Source or Sources of phenomena is characteristic of man as thinker. And if, in common with those whom I follow, I regard this quest as beyond the limits of science, I am well aware that such delimitation of fields of inquiry is by no means universally accepted. M. Bergson, for example, regards metaphysics as the Science[29] which claims to dispense with symbols, which turns its back on analysis, which eschews logic, which dispenses with relativity and pierces to the absolute, which, apparently, uses the intellect only to establish its utter incompetence in this department of 'science'. Merely saying that this, whatever else it may be, is not what I, for one, understand by science—and not, by the way, what M. Bergson in other passages seems to mean by science[30]—I pass on to Spencer's treatment of the philosophy of science which, for him, is 'completely unified knowledge', 'the truths of philosophy bearing the same relation to the highest scientific truths that each of these bears to lower scientific truths.'

I suppose one of the basal truths in his philosophy of science is for Spencer the universality of connexion between cause and effect. Now let us eliminate Source as the Ultimate Cause (so far as that is possible in Spencer); let us restrict our attention to cause and effect in the realm of the knowable. When we try to do this we find his statements concerning them scarcely less puzzling than those that refer to force, with which cause is so often identified. Thus we are told