The Unknowable: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Metaphysics, by W. J. Mander

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Unknowable: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Metaphysics by W. J. Mander Andrew Vincent (bio) The Unknowable: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Metaphysics, by W. J. Mander; pp. ix + 336. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2020, $80.00, £60.00. W. J. Mander's The Unknowable: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Metaphysics is a valuable text for scholars of Victorian thought, whether they work in philosophical, metaphysical, or scientific domains. The narrative motif is the concept of the unknowable. Droll quips aside, we do get to know a lot about the unknowable. The term, or cognates such as the unconditioned, clearly had an intricate provenance permeating many nineteenth-century debates. The unknowable is certainly not confined to the Victorian era. It both predates and postdates the nineteenth century. The rough structure of the book is divided into three broad schemes of thought which respond, in diverse ways, to the idea of the unknowable. The schemes are agnosticism, empiricism, and idealism. The themes through which the unknowable is commonly articulated are as follows: the ground of sensory experience, the intuited dimensions of space and time, the self and identity, causality, and the eternal ground of being and/or God. The period covered is approximately from the 1840s up to the turn of the century. These schemes are seen to constitute the rich history of overt or covert metaphysics in Victorian Britain. The figure who initially advanced the idea of the unknowable was Sir William Hamilton. Hamilton is probably best known today via the harsh critique in John Stuart Mill's An Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy (1865). However, in the 1840s he was a respected figure who, in Mander's words, "energized metaphysical writing in Britain" (11). The unknowable, or what Hamilton referred to as the unconditioned, derived largely from Immaneul Kant. The basic claim is that we cannot pass beyond our own phenomenal understanding; we are governed by what Hamilton called the "law of the conditioned" and we need consequently to cultivate a "learned ignorance" (13). Hamilton was also an admirer of Thomas Reid's realism. Accordingly, objects do definitely exist, but we only know them in relational terms as we perceive them. This general point constitutes a theme of agnostic realism. Analogous themes are explored in the work of Henry Mansel, although Mansel read Kant much more comprehensively in German and was not enamored of Reid's realism. Consequently, he argued more stringently than Hamilton for the limitations of reason, especially about God or morality. Herbert Spencer was disdainful of Kantianism, unsympathetic to religion, committed to an evolutionary naturalism, and confident about the reach of the empirical sciences; nonetheless, he also formulated a gauche metaphysical theory of the unknowable. [End Page 590] Mind and all theorizing were premised on an unknowable ground. Thomas Huxley developed his early views via Hamilton and was an early admirer of Spencer's metaphysical First Principles (1862). Later, however, in advancing his own evolutionary views, Huxley moved away from Spencer. It was Huxley who first coined the term agnosticism. His unknowable became a preliminary to scientific advance. Under the expansive canopy of empiricism, Mander discusses Mill, Alexander Bain, George Croom Robertson, Shadworth Hodgson, William Clifford, G. H. Lewes, and Karl Pearson. It is impossible to deal with the sheer quantity of beguiling detail in these various studies. In effect, all of these thinkers emphasized that empirical science-based knowledge suffices and that we experience reality via the senses. As Mill memorably put it: matter becomes the permanent possibility of sensation. Empiricism is combined here with phenomenalism—namely, the argument that sensations constituting appearances always interpose between us and the world. While all such empiricists resisted the agnostics' unknowable, many were still prepared to acknowledge a realm that was not yet scientifically accessible. For Mander, the high-water mark of such empiricism was Pearson's popular Grammar of Science (1892). The third scheme concerns idealism in the work of James Ferrier, John Grote, James Hutchinson Stirling, John and Edward Caird, Andrew Seth Pringle-Pattison, Henry Jones, and finally Francis Herbert Bradley. Mander employs the term objective idealism (in the main) to describe this group. He identifies...