The objection here refuted is expressed most clearly in the words of Herbert Spencer, First Principles, 25-36, 98--"The reality underlying appearances is totally and forever inconceivable by us." Mansel, Prolegomena Logica, 77, 78 (_cf._ 26) suggests the source of this error in a wrong view of the nature of the concept: "The first distinguishing feature of a concept, viz.: that it cannot in itself be depicted to sense or imagination." Porter, Human Intellect, 392 (see also 429, 656)--"The _concept_ is not a mental image"--only the _percept_ is. Lotze: "Color in general is not representable by any image; it looks neither green nor red, but has no look whatever." The generic horse has no particular color, though the individual horse may be black, white, or bay. So Sir William Hamilton speaks of "the unpicturable notions of the intelligence."
Martineau, Religion and Materialism, 39, 40--"This doctrine of Nescience stands in exactly the same relation to causal power, whether you construe it as Material Force or as Divine Agency. Neither can be _observed_; one or the other must be _assumed_. If you admit to the category of knowledge only what we learn from observation, particular or generalized, then is Force unknown; if you extend the word to what is imported by the intellect itself into our cognitive acts, to make them such, then is God known." Matter, ether, energy, protoplasm, organism, life,--no one of these can be portrayed to the imagination; yet Mr. Spencer deals with them as objects of Science. If these are not inscrutable, why should he regard the Power that gives unity to all things as inscrutable?
Herbert Spencer is not in fact consistent with himself, for in divers parts of his writings he calls the inscrutable Reality back of phenomena the one, eternal, ubiquitous, infinite, ultimate, absolute Existence, Power and Cause. "It seems," says Father Dalgairns, "that a great deal is known about the Unknowable." Chadwick, Unitarianism, 75--"The beggar phrase 'Unknowable' becomes, after Spencer's repeated designations of it, as rich as Croesus with all saving knowledge." Matheson: "To know that we know nothing is already to have reached a fact of knowledge." If Mr. Spencer intended to exclude God from the realm of Knowledge, he should first have excluded him from the realm of Existence; for to grant that he is, is already to grant that we not only may know him, but that we actually to some extent do know him; see D. J. Hill, Genetic Philosophy, 22; McCosh, Intuitions, 186-189 (Eng. ed., 214); Murphy, Scientific Bases, 133; Bowne, Review of Spencer, 30-34; New Englander, July, 1875:543, 544; Oscar Craig, in Presb. Rev., July, 1883:594-602.