ersons, is called by Lewes
"reasoned realism," and by Spencer "transfigured realism." It accepts the
reality of an outward world, but says that all man knows of it is, that it
produces impressions on his senses which are transmuted into sensations.
Sensations produce feelings, and feelings become ideas. According to
Spencer, the steps of knowledge are three: the co-ordinating of sensations
in a living organism; the registering of impressions within the organism in
such a way as to build up a store of experiences; the transmission of the
organism and its susceptibilities to offspring. Miss Hennell accepts
Spencer's theory that feeling is the source of all our knowledge. Not only,
as she says, does it "constitute the essential and main vitality of our
nature," but when it is stored up in the human organism and inherited, it
becomes the vital source out of which all moral and religious truth is
built up. Experience, transformed into inherited feeling, takes on the form
of those intuitions which "are the only reliable ground of solid belief."
"These sentiments which are born within us, slumbering as it were in our
nature, ready to be awakened into action immediately they are roused by
hint of corresponding circumstances, are drawn out of the whole of previous
human existence. They constitute our treasured inheritance out of all the
life that has been lived before us, to which no age, no human being who has
trod the earth and laid himself to rest with all his mortal burden upon her
maternal bosom, has failed to add his contribution. No generation has had
its engrossing conflict, surely battling out the triumphs of mind over
material force, and through forms of monstrous abortions concurrent with
its birth, too hideous for us now to bear in contemplation, moulding the
early intelligence by every struggle, and winning its gradual powers,--no
single soul has borne itself through its personal trial,--without
bequeathing to us of its fruit. There is not a religious thought that we
take to ourselves for secret comfort in our time of grief, that has not
been distilled out of the multiplicity of the hallowed tears of mankind;
not an animating idea is there for our fainting courage that has not
gathered its inspiration from the bravery of the myriad armies of the
world's heroes. All this best of humanity's hard earnings has been hoarded
with generous care by our _alma natura naturans_; so that at last, in our
rich ages, the _mens natura