In Spencer's system, there are two points by which his own course of reasoning is able to bridge over the poverty of his conception of religion. The first point, given on pages 107-108 of his "First Principles," and also elsewhere in his works, is the acknowledgment that the final cause of all things is _higher_ than all that we know, and is of such a nature that it really can be the real cause of everything, even the real cause of the spiritual and ethical. Thus he forbids us to think of qualities of the highest being, but he himself thinks of them; for this conception of the highest being as an _impersonal_ is certainly something else and something much more valuable than the mere negation of personality. The other point which might be able to lead him out of the vacuum of his idea of God, lies in the method of his own investigation. When he seeks the truth by collecting what is common in all the contrasts, he also must seek and find something common between the highest cause {202} of all things on one side and of the world as a whole and in detail on the other; and this something will consist of the necessity of the highest cause of all things being so qualified that _it is able_ to bring into existence the world as a whole and in detail. If such ideas are also rejected as anthropomorphisms, then all reasoning and investigating is anthropomorphistic; and in that respect we refer to what we had to say above, when treating of teleology (p. 170 ff.). The same Duke of Argyll whom we there had occasion to quote, in an article in the "Contemporary Review" (May, 1871), upon "Variety as an Aim in Nature," has admirably shown that it is the mind of man from which we may draw conclusions as to the nature of the Creator, and that the picture which we thus get of him, can at the same time be seen true and yet dim, at the same time real and yet from a distance; for the human mind does not feel anything so much as its own limitations, and therefore can easily imagine each of his powers and talents as being present in the highest being in infinite perfection. If Spencer had made this comparison, and drawn the conclusions which follow from it for the nature of the final cause of all things, the indiscernibleness of God would for him be reduced to an unsearchableness, the unknowable be changed into an unsearchable, and we could willingly acknowledge the humble modesty in regard to the infinity of the deity, which his philosophy requires, as a factor of all true religiousness. But we have to present to him as an expression, not only of true religiousness, but also of true science, that passage of the Psalms: "He that planted the ear, shall he {203} not hear? He that formed the eye, shall he not see?" (Psalm XCIV, 9.) Sec. 4. _Spinoza and Hegel in the Garb of Darwin: Carneri. Eduard von Hartmann._