This Mr. Spencer denies. "Let those," he says, "who can, believe that
there is eternal war between our intellectual faculties and our moral
obligations. I, for one, admit of no such radical vice in the
constitution of things." (p. 108). Religion has always erred, he
asserts, in that while it teaches that the Infinite Being cannot be
known, it insists on ascribing to it such and such attributes, which of
course assumes that so far forth it is known. We have no right, he
contends, to ascribe personality to the "Unknown Reality," or anything
else, except that it is the cause of all that we perceive or experience.
There may be a mode of being, as much transcending intelligence and
will, as these transcend mechanical motion. To show the folly of
referring to the Unknown the attributes of our own spirits, he makes
"the grotesque supposition that the tickings and other movements of a
watch constituted a kind of consciousness; and that a watch possessed of
such a consciousness, insisted on regarding the watchmaker's actions as
determined like its own by springs and escapements." (p. 111). The vast
majority of men, instead of agreeing with Mr. Spencer in this matter,
will doubtless heartily, each for himself, join the German philosopher
Jacobi, in saying, "I confess to Anthropomorphism inseparable from the
conviction that man bears the image of God; and maintain that besides
this Anthropomorphism, which has always been called Theism, is nothing
but Atheism or Fetichism.
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