This censure of Spencer was combated in a subsequent number of the _Index_, by a writer signing himself "Evolutionist." The Editor prints his letter, and replies to it briefly:--"1. The 'unknowable' must be an absolute blank to every intelligence. It surely cannot be held legitimate to make _any predicate_ of it whatever, as Mr. Spencer himself admits. Yet he does make predicates of it which are 'derived from our own natures' and thus violates his own principle. 'Omnipresence' is simply _presence throughout all space_; and what do we know of 'presence' at all but by our own experience? Mr. Spencer does the very thing he forbids us to do, in making this predication. "2. The difference between him and us is briefly this. He denies that we know anything of Force; we affirm that we know it just so far as it perceptibly acts. The Cause of Nature we maintain to be known _in its effects_. Hence Force is not to us the 'Unknowable,' but is rather the 'God of Science,' known just so far as Nature is known." Here follow some stringent criticisms of the distinction between phenomena and noumena accepted by Mill as well as Spencer, which we pass over as being somewhat unintelligible without a longer discussion than can here be given to them. On the subject of our first quotation--Empiricism--many readers may like to peruse the opinion of a writer far removed from Mr. Abbott in philosophy. The following is Hegel's dictum:-- "In Empiricism lies the great principle that whatever is true must be in the actual world and present to sensation.... Touching this principle it has been justly observed that, in what we call Experience, as distinct from the individual sensation of individual facts, there are two elements. First, there is the infinitely complex matter, which so far as itself is concerned is individualised: secondly, there is the form, as seen in the characteristics of universality and necessity. Empiricism no doubt can point to many, almost innumerable, similar perceptions: but, after all, no multitude, however great, can be the same thing as universality. Similarly, Empiricism reaches so far as the perception of changes in succession and of objects in juxtaposition or co-existence; but it presents no necessary connexion. If sensation, therefore, is to maintain its claim to be the sole basis of what men hold for truth, universality and necessity can have no right to exist: they become an accident of our minds, a mere custom, the content of which might be otherwise constituted than it is. "It is an important corollary of this theory, that in the empirical mode of treatment the truths and rules of justice and morality, as well as the body of religion, are exhibited as the work of chance, and stripped of their objective character and inner truth."[133]