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WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT THE UNKNOWN.*
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The Commission , goes so far in its charity as to pay the landlords of the paupers to keep their lodging-houses warm . ¦ In the year 1838 , when the population was 300 , 000 , the Commissioners had , as messengers , twenty-three paid sergeants , and ; twelve poor wards , specially charged with the look-out after street be ^ gats , and taking them to the proper houses of relief . . At the time above referred to , the sum total of the expenditure amounted to £ 54 , 000 , raised from legacies , royal gifts , voluntary contributions , and municipal taxes , which are confessedly heavy . In many respects , says our writer , this is a poor-law , and our own poor-law operations have probably , in many respects , been borrowed from the German system ; but relief in the latter has a better effect as coming more in the form of benevolence . The agency is strictly eleemosynary , except in the case of the medical men actually in attendance , and a few working clerks , whose united salaries do between £ 2000 and £ 3000
aiot seem to amount to more than , ,. Instead of unpaid sitters at poor-law boards , comparatively an easy af&ir , —listening to beadles and overseers , the benevolent gentry and tradesmen of Berlin seem themselves to investigate , with some personal trouble , the cases upon which they sit in judgment . Something less severe and hide-bound , and more gracious than our regular poor-law operations , and at the same time less loose and irregular , and often unpersistent and blundering than the efforts of private benevolence frequently are , seems to be wanting . The new Society , if destined to be , as it professes to desire to be , very wide in its operations , can only be efficient if well systematised , and if it can make all private efforts regularly working-wheels of a well-organized machine . Boththemoney andefforts will , as now proposed , be , we suppose , almost entirely those of charity , and it will be a great pity if , for want of a well-matured plan , misdirection x > £ the efforts leads to misspending of the funds .
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[ second notice . J I T seems , at the first blush , a sort of paradox that / we should know anything about the " Unknown ; " we do know something , however , as those may see who choose to consult the work mentioned below . The sceptics sought to establish the doubt of certitude * the certitude of doubt , we forget which , wars ccst egal , and a . cognition of the unknowable is an essential element of modern knowledge . Indeed , even one of the ancients , whom a modern poet of some authority in matters "didactic " -r-Pope— considered the wisest of the wise men of Greece , declared that all he knew was that he knew nothing ; therefore it would appear that
the more ws know the Ies 3 we know ; and since his days astronomy , geology , chemistry , physiology , have become , and sociology is fast becoming , a portion of pur knowledge—and knowledge in the scientific sense of the word , too . And it follows that if the more we know the less we know , our knowledge of nothing , if not our no-knowledge or nescience , must be a pretty considerable deal greater now than formerly . We remarked , in our former notice , on the " suggestiveness " of Mr . Spencer ' s work . He alludes , in the opening pages of the part before us , to the earliest traditions having represented rulers as gods ordemi-gods . By their subjects , he says , primitive kings were regarded as superhumam . in origin and superhuman in power ; and he refers to the similar beliefs now existent among savages , instancing Fiji , where " a victim
stands unbound to be killed at the word of the chief , himself declaring , ' whatever the king says must be done . ' " And we may remark in passing , it is pretty much the same in Russia . This suggests to us a few remarks on the origin of mythology — an enigma hitherto unsolved , though the astutist " representative men" of the various " philosophies " extant have sought to solve it . Now we find , among other psychical powers of man , these three , which are among those in daily use and manifestation . There is the well-known and sometimes eminently disagreeable and ridiculous , but in the main most useful quality- —curiosity ; of which our old friend "Paul Pry , " of Listoniari celebrity , is simply a stage incarnation , a quality which is insufferable as developed in the old lady who , when sick , and unable personally to inquire into her neighbours' affairs , nearly caught her death of cold , by keeping her maid at the open window to report
who went in and out at every house in the street ; but still a quality to which we are mainly indebted for every scientific truth wo Know . There is what we may call the faculty of analogization , or tho tendency to reason by analogy j to account for what puzzles us , for what is new and strange , by assigning 1 what appears to us tho most likely and wobable cause * The savages who saw clocks and fire for ( the first time , not being familiar with anything 1 capable of selfmbrament , and of consuming other things , except live animals , aocounted for these objects of their surprise by supposing them to be alive ; the clock was an animal ; ho was the fire , and lived upon wood . 4 ndced anqtlogization is the groundwork of ourvaasonincs . not onlv
in , the daily business of life , but in scientific investigations . There pi what has been , called " the first law of nature , " " the instinot *> f self-preservation , ' prompting , among other things , to oonp »^ te , b > weans of presents , courtesies , prayers , respeot , &o ., the powerful ismp can do us good , or harm , in order to avert their . frof tfttty iwd secure their good will , and good offices . Wo do not ( Wows ? / the point here , whether these are simple original primary jfaonltieB or not . This is besidci our present purpose . Tho psyohioai characteristics in question are " patent to all tho world . " When , therefore , a being of whoso nature these are a part , a 'being as yet uninformed as to the universe about him , oomos to
ponder upon the cosmical phenomena that strike his eyes in every direction , the first sensation is one of surprise andcuriosity as to what these things are , and whence they came ? The most prominent objects in ¦ ¦ narture would be the sua and other heavenly bodies . He would wonder how they could move . Animals , and his fellow men , being the things he was most familiar with that could move , and these being alive and able to move in virtue of their vitality , he would infer , analogically , that the heavenly bodies possessed life also , and moved in consequence . For their apparent motion to the mind of science is real motion to the eye of ignorance . But animals and man are resentful , vindictive , interested , on the look out for what they can get , capable of doing very ill turns , or of doing good ones if it can be made
worth their while by suitable inducements and considerations j and all these qualities are in respect of their being alive . Thus selfmovement being regarded as indicative of being alive , tile sun , the moon , the stars , the winds , the clouds , lightning , storms , meteors , would be thought alive . And nothing being more proverbially capricious and inconstant than these things ( which , as to some of them , in great part , make up that by-word for fickleness , the weather ) , and nothing more spiteful as well as destructive in the eyes of untutored -mail , the " instinct of self-preservation " would prompt him to conciliate these dangerous and powerful agents ; and " analogization " would suggest he should do so by similar means to those he \ Vould employ in conciliating his fellow living- beings on this earth ; and in this way
mvthology , fetichism , superstition , would arise . None of the attempts to explain this difficulty hitherto given are satisfactory . Comte's "Three Stages" of mental development ( the last theory on the subject ) cannot throw a glimmer of light upon it . Why do 6 S ignorant inexperienced man begin with fetichism ? JSdip- comes it that that particular phase is the first in the scries ? Nay , how does this fetichism originate , when it does come ! To these interrogatives Comte s dumb .. His theory affords \\ o solution ; the above explanation satisfactorily accounts for the difficulty . Comte ' s doctrine amounts ¦ merely to a ¦ statement that . in the progress of the mental evolution his three stages tire to be found in tho order he has specified . Whether that is so or not ( on which point nion
we do not wish to be understood here as expressing any opi whatever ) , will not in the least elucidate the difficulty . What caused the first , stage ? How did fetiehisra and its subsequent developments originate ? These queries we have answered above . We come now to another point suggested by the work before us . This is the doctrine that human conceptions which , as . $ uch , are something entirely subjective , although caused by objective realities , are the measure or criterion of what is possible in the external universe . Whether there is an external universe or not we do not intend in this place to inquire . For anything we shall say here , the reader may believe that his ego , his pst / ckicality is the only existence in nature , and all apparently objective realities a dream . We do not believe with Byron ,
that" When Bishop Berkeley said there was no matter , And proved it , 'twas no matter what he said . " We think it matters a great deal what he said , and whether thero is an external world or not . But wo shall not discuss that point here ; we shall solve the riddle by cutting tho knot , o r rather cutting tho controversy , and assuming the existence of an objective universe . The inconsistency of those has been much ridiculed , who , denying an external world , still act as if they believed m one , and take good care not to run their headw against a post , literally speaking ; however they may bo thought to
do so in a figurative senso . But what shall wo say or the consistency of thoso who , while admitting thut tho external world has a real independent , existence of its own , are yet obnoxious to the paradox of contending' that its existence depends upon intelligence P It is caw , however , to explain tho cause of their blunder . They mistake our conceptions of the universe for the universe itself ; just as tho word " law " in philosophical and scientific discussions sometimes means tho way m wlncn external realities act , and at others , i « usod to designate the propositions or formulas emmoved to express tho way in which things act .
Thus wo often find montion made of Newton ' s " Law of Gravitation , " Dalton's " Law , of Definite Proportions , " Sec . ; as if Dulton and Newton woro the inventors and croator . s of now laws , instead ot the discoverers of la \ yy that previously oxistod . Doubtless the written propositions in' which tho sophilosophors expressed their <»« - coverios , doubtloss their discoveries themselves , woro , as such , new and original , and tho result of their own minds j and if wo use tlio word 'Maw " to designate those written propositions and discoveries , then they wore tho authors of these laws . But thin , though a common , is by no means a prociso and an accurate form of expression . It has led to infinite confusion of ideas , and innumoriiblo mistakes . The laws , properly speaking , are tho ways in whim in
things act j the way in which bodies attraot each other ; the way which ohemioal substances combine together ; the way in which they did attract and combine ages before Newton and Dalton were born ; the way in which they attract and combine , whether the human mind observe them or not ; the way in which they would attraot and combine , if the human race were annihilated to-morrow , if all intolliffonoe ceased to exist on the face of the earth , wo must always l ) o careful to distinguish our idea , or notion , or conception of a tiling from tho thing itself j tho former porishos with utj , but not tho liittor . Tho mime " confusion worse con founded , obtains In reference tho olaasifloationn Jof natural history . Wo often honr it said , and boo it written , that HjpeoMW and gonora , & < s . do not oxist in nature , but aro moreiy
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t ) iQ The Saturday Analyst and Leader . pSTov . 3 , 1860
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• Mr , Spanner \ t System qf Philosophy . Vixvi L , October , 1800 . " First rrluolploa i Tbo Unknowable . ' ' , fctrndont Mnnwwfng-.
What We Know About The Unknown.*
WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT THE UNKNOWN . *
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Leader (1850-1860), Nov. 3, 1860, page 910, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse2.kdl.kcl.ac.uk/periodicals/l/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2372/page/6/
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