Spencer’s doctrine, as here stated, is not adequate to account for the world of mental life or adapted to serve as the basis of a reconciliation of science and religion.  It does not carry us beyond materialism.  Spencer’s real intention was directed to something higher than that.  If the absolute is to be conceived at all, it is as a necessary correlative of our self-consciousness.  If we get the idea of force from the experience of our own power of volition, is it not natural to think of mind-force as the prius of physical force, and not the reverse?  Accordingly, the absolute force, basis of all specific forces, would be mind and will.  The doctrine of evolution would harmonise perfectly with these inferences.  But it would have to become idealistic evolution, as in Schelling, instead of materialistic, as in Comte.  We are obliged, Spencer owns, to refer the phenomenal world of law and order to a first cause.  He says that this first cause is incomprehensible.  Yet he further says, when the question of attributing personality to this first cause is raised, that the choice is not between personality and something lower.  It is between personality and something higher.  To this may belong a mode of being as much transcending intelligence and will as these transcend mechanical motion.  It is strange, he says, that men should suppose the highest worship to lie in assimilating the object of worship to themselves.  And yet, again, in one of the latest of his works he writes:  ’Unexpected as it will be to most of my readers, I must assert that the power which manifests itself in consciousness is but a differently conditioned form of the power which manifests itself beyond consciousness.  The conception to which the exploration of nature everywhere tends is much less that of a universe of dead matter than that of a universe everywhere alive.’

Similar is the issue in the reflexion of Huxley.  Agnosticism had at first been asserted in relation to the spiritual and the teleological.  It ended in fastening upon the material and mechanical.  After all, says Huxley, in one of his essays:—­’What do we know of this terrible matter, except as a name for an unknown and hypothetical cause of states of our own consciousness?  Again, what do we know of that spirit over whose threatened extinction by matter so great lamentation has now arisen, except that it is also a name for an unknown and hypothetical cause of states of our consciousness?’ He concedes that matter is inconceivable apart from mind, but that mind is not inconceivable apart from matter.  He concedes that the conception of universal and necessary law is an ideal.  It is an invention of the mind’s own devising.  It is not a physical fact.  In brief, taking agnostic naturalism just as it seemed disposed a generation ago to present itself, it now appears as if it had been turned exactly inside out.  Instead of the physical world being primary and fundamental and the mental world secondary, if not altogether problematical, the precise converse is true.