There will be to many people much force in this plea for leaving inscrutables amidst their primary obscurities. But it is open to a rejoinder suggested by Mr. Spencer himself,--you cannot prevent the Mind from inquiring; and, in point of fact, Spencer in person leads the way. He places before us the ultimate idea of a self-existent First Cause. Now surely he might reflect that such an Idea not only permits but invites analysis;--it is no empty abstraction, but a substantive thought and a full one. But he bars analysis to his own satisfaction, by saying that the Idea is in its own Nature inscrutable. Respecting this position two questions arise. First, if inscrutable as to its ultimate nature--its highest essence, and deepest thought,--is it so in its attributes? Next, if Spencer's special walk in philosophy ends with the bare positing of this Idea, must _all_ Philosophy do the same? Suppose the Physicist says--"Here I learn to know the Fact of a self-existent universal First Cause," may not the investigator of our Practical human Reason try to discover whether an Ethical view ought or ought not to be taken of this Self-Existent? To answer "No," is either to make physical philosophy the _sole_ philosophy; or it is to dismember and disjoint the universal Body of Truth into departmental carcase-fragments;--a process which never can begin till all Life has been effectually crushed out of the Whole.[136] For every one who takes wide views of Philosophy;--for every inquirer into First Principles;--above all, if Mr. Spencer will permit us to say so, for every Encyclopædic writer like himself, a question must arise the answer to which it is incumbent on all and each to ascertain, "Can we have any conscious idea whatever of a First Cause without including that very fact of Personality from which Spencer appears to shrink?" Nay we may rather put the point thus: "Is not our idea and definition of _Causality_ derived from Personal existence, and apart from this source of derivation, does not the derived idea perish?"--If so, to speak of a non-personal First Cause both of the outside world and of mind itself is to use words to which no thinker can consciously attach any real meaning. There must, says Mr. Spencer, be Power behind Appearance;--in other words, Phenomena imply a Cause behind them,--but to add that this Power or Cause is conceivably impersonal, seems nothing better than to imagine (Hibernicè) at the beginning of the phenomenal chain, a _prior_ phenomenon which in its own nature and _ex vi verborum_ cannot account for a Beginning[137] at all;--cannot, to use Mr. Spencer's expression, be "ultimate"; and, in short, requires to be accounted for, itself.