Volume 1

First principles / by Herbert Spencer.

  • Spencer, Herbert, 1820-1903.
Date:
1910
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: First principles / by Herbert Spencer. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    of Body disappears, leaving behind it the consciousness of Space. And since the group of co-existing resistant positions gives us impressions of resistance whether we touch its near, its remote, its right, or its left side; it results that as different muscular adjust- ments indicate different co-existences, we are obliged to conceive every portion of matter as containing more than one resistant position—that is, as occupying Space. Hence the necessity we are under of representing to ourselves the ultimate elements of Matter as being at once extended and resistant: this being the universal form of our sensible experiences of Matter, becomes the form which our conception of it cannot transcend, however minute the frag- ments which imaginary subdivisions produce. Of these two inseparable elements, the resistance is primary and the extension secondary. Occupied extension, or Body, being distinguished in consciousness from unoccupied extension, or Space, by its resistance, this attribute must clearly have precedence in the genesis of the idea. If, as was argued in the last section, the experiences, mainly ancestral, from which our consciousness of Space is ab- stracted, can be received only through impressions of resistance made on the organism; the implication is, that experiences of resistance being those from which the conception of Space is generated, the resistance-attribute of Matter must be regarded as primordial and the space-attribute as derivative. Whence it becomes clear that our experiences oiforce, are those out of which the idea of Matter is built. Matter as opposing our muscular energies, being immediately present to consciousness in terms of force; and its occupancy of Space being known by an abstract of experiences originally given in terms of force ; it follows that forces, standing in certain correlations, form the whole content of oin: idea of Matter. Such being our cognition of the relative reality, what are we to i say of the absolute reality ? We can only say that it is some mode I of the Unknowable, related to the Matter we know as cause to effect. The relativity of our cognition of Matter is shown alike by ' the above analysis, and by the contradictions which are evolved when we deal with the cognition as an absolute one (§ 16). But, as we have lately seen, though known to us only under relation. Matter is as real, in the true sense of that word, as it would be