But now let us attend a little more closely to Mr. Spencer's grand objection to this mode of thinking. The reader will be careful to note that what he needs to ascertain is, whether Mr. Spencer's agnostic theory is really sound. To test it, he must inquire just where the supposed difficulty lies. Translated into other language, Mr. Spencer's position is this: In order to keep within the sphere of possible thought, there must be a definite relation between any two ideas, which must not lapse, but the two ideas must be equally capable of mental representation. When one term of the relation is an idea capable of mental representation, as when we think of a thing cognizable by our senses, and the other term of the relation is something that lies beyond them, the law of thought, according to Mr. Spencer, can no longer be conformed to; the relation lapses; the latter term can not be present to the mind; we pass out of the sphere of thought into that which can not be a subject of thought, the unknown and the unknowable. What takes place in this process is assumed to be this: We take certain phenomenal manifestations which we are able to observe and to describe. Out of the materials which these phenomenal manifestations give us, we "symbolize the Ultimate Reality." We do this, by arguing from the phenomenal manifestations which convince us of the existence of a being whom we know and can observe, to the existence of a being in whom we "symbolize" qualities and faculties which the phenomenal manifestations show us to belong to human beings. At the same time we represent to ourselves by the same symbolizing process a connection between the Ultimate Reality and its manifestation, which is allied to the connections among the phenomenal manifestations which we observe in man, or in nature. In other words, we reason from what we see and can measure and describe, to that which we can not see or describe, and we end in a term of the relation which can not be present to the mind, and thus no thinkable relation can be framed.