Mr. Spencer's doctrine of illusion and phenomena is dealt with in Chap. 5. “Is a thing identical with its own appearances?” To put the question is to refute the assumption, save to such as repeating a falsehood for years believe it at length. Mr. A. takes gravitation as a plain disproof, a certain fact that appears not; and again ether, a necessary condition of appearances. “They become known to us, not by being shown to any organ of sense, but by force of evidence collected from all points of the field of observation.” “When things that do not make any appearance are called phenomena, it is by a use of language looser than when thinkers mean work...... Though these non-appearing realities wait in their silent abodes to be felt after and found by the spirit of man, the innumerable phenomena of which they are either the condition or the cause constantly point up to them. To all men except philosophers Appearances intelligibly announce their place and mission in the general system of things. To ordinary people it seems to be a fact upon the face of nature that the Appearance fills an appointed place as a messenger of knowledge between a body and a mind; in a manner in which the word holds its place between one mind and another. Many as are the strong points of a body, it has no inheritance in the Logos. It cannot learn a language, and it cannot speak or be spoken to. By other bodies this would never be deplored; for to them it is no defect...... Here then enters the Appearance, having its office and nature well defined. Just as speechless matter could not make itself known to mind without some such method of appearances; so mind could not itself command language without some such method. An Appearance is a combination whereby a body shoots forth from itself into a mind the announcement: Here I am. Except to a mind it can make no such announcement. The appearance also affords some clue as to what kind of an I is the one so announced” (pp. 314-316).
“Now is an appearance to be confounded with the thing that makes it, any more than a word is with the speaker? Yet while we should not call both orator or oration speech, we do habitually call both an appearance and the substance which makes it phenomena. Why philosophers should exercise such feats of writing over what to ordinary persons would appear as plain as nature can make it, is not for us to say. We must deferentially accept their prodigious paragraphs as throes of the evolution from well-digested common thought into purely technical formulas. Nevertheless, we shall never be content to regard, say, a peacock and the appearance as one and the same thing. We shall not be persuaded that on a pitch-dark night when he makes no appearance there is any less of him or any different form of him from what existed at golden noon when he dazzled the beholders. We shall not believe that it makes the difference of a feather to his frame whether the beholders are a wren and a yellow-hammer, or a whole school of children. Let those who think it philosophic call him, and not merely his appearance, a phenomenon. We shall call him a peacock—a peacock when he makes a phenomenon, and as much a peacock when he does not appear” (p. 319).
Next, Mr. A. asks, Are phenomena disguises? Mr. Spencer, in his Classification of the Sciences, says that “Science is that which treats of the forms in which phenomena are known to us,” and elsewhere “of the phenomena themselves.” What does this mean but the forms of forms? “It may seem at first sight hard to believe, but what he really intended is that science treats of things, with time and space. Kant had called time and space forms of thought, to which Mr. Spencer demurs, and calls them forms of things. But in his formula he does not call things things but phenomena, and consequently makes time and space forms of phenomena. One thing however is manifest that for Mr. Spencer things are phenomena and the forms of things are time and space. Here comes boldly into view the conception of Mr. Spencer as to the place and office of phenomena or appearances. He usually contrasts phenomenon and reality, not phenomenon and substance. This assumes that the phenomenon is not a reality; whereas be it an appearance, an image, a reflection, or even a shadow, it is a reality as truly as the substance it discloses: “The shadows on the sun dial have played the part of important realities in many a juncture of urgency” (pp. 320-323).
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SCIENCE IS
I. That which treats of the forms in which phenomena are known to us.
A. Abstract Science
i. Logic
ii. Mathematics
II. That which treats of the phenomena themselves.
A. In their elements
i. Abstract concrete science
a. Mechanics
b. Physics
c. Chemistry, &c.,
B. In their totalities
i. Concrete Science
a. Astronomy
b. Geology
c. Biology
d. Psychology
e. Sociology, &c.
“To keep our own point of view, we do not note in these two groups of studies any other feature than this, that the objects of knowledge are so described as to throw out in high relief Mr. Spencer's doctrine that phenomena are not revealing messengers, but disguises.” Appearances he will have to be illusive. So he reasons, as others before, on “the looking-glass.” Now what this proves is simply that first impressions need to be checked; which is true of touch as well as of sight, and no less of mental impressions, as Mr. A. shows. Even at the first the looking-glass conveys true if imperfect information; it is only subordinate traits which are illusive. “The glass shows the appearance of a man; and a man there is. What is in fault is not sight, but inexperience...... A few repetitions of the experience enable us to distinguish these traits, and to discriminate between a direct appearance of a man and one reflected. This is correction by sight itself, not by touch. Sight told true. It shewed what was to be shown. A man is present, otherwise never would the glass give the reflection—never would the eyes see it” (p. 326).
“It is obvious that the question, whether appearances disguise realities or reveal them, involves the truthfulness of the whole system of communication in nature....... The reality of the knower and the distinction between him and the things to be made known are both implied in the supposition of a scheme of illusory communications as well as in that of a scheme of truthful ones Therefore the idea that a system of illusion clears the way to the doctrine of universal identity, by destroying the reality of supposed persons and things, is superficial. Persons and things are as real when disguising themselves by false appearances, as when manifesting themselves by true ones. Persons deceived by disguises are as real as persons informed by frank appearances” (p. 328).
Clearly if phenomena disguise, instead of revealing, knowledge is impossible even to man endowed with mental powers beyond other creatures on earth; phenomena would be worse than useless. It is the Maya that snits an Oriental Pantheist, as Mr. A. argues, not an observer unprepared for its moral and social corollaries. Brahm in that scheme is alone the true existence, and man peculiarly under illusion who thinks of himself as separate from Brahm, the ever-acting power, who wishes, designs, discriminates and causes (Bhagavat Gita, § x.; Upanishads), though inconsistently man bears the penalty of demerit, and has pain and pleasure, while God does all. This is not universal identity. Such “inconsistency is far from being the effect of a transient lapse of attention. It has a far deeper cause. The reality of which phenomena are the appearances are not to the Agnostic, as to us, a substance proper to each thing taken individually and specially indicated by appropriate appearances. On the contrary, the Reality is one universal substance, sole and continuous in time, sole and continuous in space, which appears within us, which appears without, which is in itself the All-Being. Hence appearances are not truly appearances, but disguises—the antitheses of appearances, which are the manifestations of one person to another, or of a thing to a person; whereas disguises are expedients for preventing an appearance from conveying the truth; and in the case supposed for deceiving parts of the same being by giving them an impression that they are distinct from the whole, and hold intercourse with it. If there is in existence but one substance, and no other being to which it can be manifested, and if all appearances are no more than tremors in that one substance, then manifestly each appearance indicative of a separate individual, is a sheer delusion, and phenomena in the total are properly called all-nothingness. They may seem to be heavens and earth, forces and motion, form and thought, war and repose, but they are only curls of foam on the same stream; not even that—all only oscillations on the same cord; not even that—they are All-nothingness.
“This conception, so closely allied to the Pantheistic one, carries with it the same broad incongruity which encumbers that theory. How can nothingness be deluded? how can it think, how imagine that things appear to it? How can it meet one appearance by suppressing it, and another by rendering it permanent? How can nothingness construct Synthetic Philosophies? Although Mr. Spencer groups together all kinds of phenomena under the one heading of All-Nothingness, it is to be said that he does not believe in two kinds of nothing. A noteworthy argument of his for refusing to look upon time and space as nonentities is that to do so involves the absurdity that there are two kinds of nothing. Perhaps it only involves the assertion that two things of which people speak are both nothing. One may say that a griffin is nothing, and that a phoenix is nothing, without believing in two kinds of nothing. But sorely two kinds of it need not embarrass one who can put all phenomena into the category of nothingness. If men and cattle, fields and farming implements, are all so much differentiated nothingness, surely there must be a considerable variety of nothings” (pp. 337-9).