These revelations profess to make known the nature of the Absolute. They call the Absolute “Him,” “Infinite,” “Self-created,” “Self-existent,” “Personal,” and ascribe to this “Him” attributes implying profound mediation. All definite forms of religion, all definite theology, must at once be discarded according to Spencer’s principle. Self-consciousness, even, is regarded as impossible by him (p. 65): “Clearly a true cognition of self implies a state in which the knowing and known are one, in which subject and object are identified; and this Mr. Mansel rightly holds to be the annihilation of both.” He considers it a degradation (p. 109) to apply personality to God: “Is it not possible that there is a mode of being as much transcending intelligence and will as these transcend mechanical motion?” And again (p. 112) he holds that the mere “negation of absolute knowing contains more religion than all dogmatic theology.” (P. 121,) “All religions are envelopes of truth, which reveal to the lower and conceal to the higher.” (P. 66,) “Objective and subjective things are alike inscrutable in their substance and genesis.” “Ultimate religious and scientific ideas (p. 68) alike turn out to be mere symbols of the actual, and not cognitions of it.” (P. 69,) “We come to the negative result that the reality existing behind all appearances must ever be unknown.” In these passages we see a dualism posited in this form: “Everything immediate is _phenomenal_, a manifestation of the hidden and inscrutable essence.” This essence is the unknown and unknowable; yet it _manifests_ itself in the immediate or phenomenal. The first stage of thought was unconscious that it dealt all the time with a mediated result (a dualism) while it assumed an immediate; that it asserted all truth to lie in the sensuous object, while it named at the same time “_matter_ and _force_,” categories of reflection. The second stage has got over _that_ difficulty, but has fallen into another. For if the phenomenon _manifested_ the essence, it could not be said to be “unknowable, hidden, and inscrutable.” But if the essence is _not_ manifested by the phenomenon, then we have the so-called phenomenon as a self-existent, and therefore independent of the so-called essence, which stands coördinated to it as another existent, which cannot be known because it does not manifest itself to us. Hence the “phenomenon” is no _phenomenon_, or manifestation of aught but itself, and the “essence” is simply a fiction of the philosopher. Hence his talk about essence is purely gratuitous, for there is not shown the need of one. A dialectical consideration of essence and phenomenon will result as follows: Essence and Phenomenon. I. If essence is seized as independent or absolute being, it may be taken in two senses: