[54] Mr. Spencer grapples with the problem of ultimate reality from
three different and widely divergent standpoints. First, by assuming
that our out and out conditioned nature and knowledge presupposes the
existence of an “Unconditioned Reality,” he arrives at the conception of
an “Absolute Cause.” Second, by attributing—in keeping with the principle
of the Conservation of Energy, all physical and psychical activity to the
interconvertible play of modes of force, he arrives at the conception
of an “Absolute Force,” whence all these manifest modes proceed;
hinting, moreover, that, as our experience of force-manifestation is
of a psychical nature, the “Absolute Force” may rather be conceived as
psychical than as physical. Third, besides explaining at times that
the psychical and physical modes, instead of being interconvertible,
are only two different aspects of one and the same reality—and
contrary to his assumption of the interconvertibility of psychical and
physical modes proceeding from an Absolute Force, he advocates in his
_Transfigured Realism_ the view, that our perceptual consciousness
figures representatively the corresponding characteristics of a world of
things-in-themselves. No wonder that Spencerians are getting somewhat
mixed, as the saying is.