because it involves the impossible
conception of infinite past-time, he is logically bound by accepting one
horn of the dilemma, to admit the conception of self-existence into the
realm of the Knowable, or by choosing the other, to transfer his
"Indestructibility," his "possibility of exact Science" into the realm
of the Unknowable! In either event, we place an ultimate religious idea
and a scientific conception whose denial he admits to be the
annihilation of exact Science, upon the same footing, and so reduce the
distinguishing characteristic which he has set up to differentiate the
Knowable from the Unknowable, to zero.

Second. We come now to the statement of some of the consequences which
follow from Mr. Spencer's view--already explained--as to how the higher
warrant, by which we know the Indestructibility of Matter to be an
axiom, a self-evident truth, originated. In his chapter upon "Ultimate
Scientific Ideas" he says that Space and Time are "wholly
incomprehensible," and that "Matter ... in its ultimate nature, is as
absolutely incomprehensible as Space and Time." He affirms, as pointed
out, that no experimental verification is possible without assuming what
we set out to prove. If the chemical balance cannot demonstrate this
truth, how, then, can we know it? It is, we are told, an _a priori_ or
necessary truth which arises in our consciousness through the
"cognitions that have been rendered organic by immense accumulations of
experiences, received partly by the individual, but mainly by all
ancestral individuals whose nervous systems" we inherit. This is Mr.
Spencer's answer. This commits us to the absurdity, that the truth of
the doctrine of the Indestructibility of Matter has come to be accepted
as axiomatic by the repetition of cognitions of an inconceivable
"absolute uniformity" of things, by an indefinite series of ancestors,
in the face of the fact that the present development of Science does not
_now_ permit us, with the aid of all its apparatus, to receive a single
logically valid cognition from the same phenomenal world which supplied
all the others; _ergo_, add together a sufficient number of cognitions
of the inconceivable, and you arrive at an axiomatic truth! To lift a
ton weight, apply a vast number of forces of one ounce intensity, acting
_successively_ in time, and the thing is done!

Mr. Spencer cannot point out the characteristics which separate those
inconceivable things and qualities which