Identifier: americanaunivers14newy (find matches)
Title: The Americana; a universal reference library, comprising the arts and sciences, literature, history, biography, geography, commerce, etc., of the world
Year: 1908 (1900s)
Authors:
Subjects: Encyclopedias and dictionaries
Publisher: New York : Scientific American Compiling Dept.
Contributing Library: University of California Libraries
Digitizing Sponsor: Internet Archive

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or the test of the inconceivabil-ity of the opposite assures us, as on? of theabsolute certainties, that a world of genuinereality, transcending all our experience, bothexists and is unknowable to us. It is equallyimpossible to deny (or rationally to doubt) thereality of such a world and to attempt any posi-tive theory as to what its ultimate nature is.Subjective idealism, denying that the unknow-able exists at all, is therefore, according toSpencer, quite unthinkable. But every effort togive a positive account of ultimate reality breaksdown by leading us to unavoidable contradic-tions, such as are involved in attempting toconceive the world in its wholeness, as eitherfinite or infinite, as either caused or uncaused,as either absolute or relative, and so forth. All such epistemological considerations, how-ever, are for Spencer mere preliminaries. Hisprincipal philosophical interest lies on the posi-tive side, namely, in the effort to reduce tounity the laws of the knowable world, that
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f SPENCER is, the laws which govern the phenomena ofnature, buch a unification depends, first, uponrecognizing the persistence of force — a termby means of which Spencer denotes the con-servation of energy, as he conceives that fact.In practice, however, Spencers term persist-ence of force* is applied in more various waysthan tliose which are customary in case of theusual doctrine of the conservation of energy.The persistence of force, used as a principle,guarantees us against accepting miracles,against conceiving anything as occurring counterto strict natural law, against accepting the doc-trine of special creation, and so forth. In brief,the doctrine of the persistence of force givesus a view of what may be called the analyticunity of nature, namely, a view of that charac-ter which is common to every sort of naturalprocess. If, however, we turn from the considera-tion of this most universal aspect of nature toa study of the various types of natural processeswhich are observable wh

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