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Who was Herbert Spencer?

Herbert Spencer’s ashes are buried in Highgate Cemetary (I took this picture myself)

Herbert Spencer (27 April 1820 – 8 December 1903) was an English philosopher, biologist, anthropologist, sociologist, and prominent classical liberal political theorist of the Victorian era. As a polymath, he contributed to a wide range of subjects, including ethics, religion, anthropology, economics, political theory, philosophy, literature, astronomy, biology, sociology, and psychology.

He is best known for his ‘survival of the fittest’ projection of Aristocratic virtues in a socio-economic theory inspired by the works of Charles Darwin. Darwin is often misrepresented on this matter, although he did declare ‘survival of the fittest’ meaning ‘the species that survives adapted best to the environment’ in his theory of evolution, it was Spencer who created a social theory known as Social Darwinism. This was typical of many philosophers of his time to retroject their own values throughout time and form a social and political economic theory based on this idiosyncracy and then turn it into a natural law that applied to society and culture. Spencer was part of the aristocracy and so he equated ‘fittest’ with ‘white and rich’. Spencer solidified these values in the form of Social Darwinism and his work was influential for those who wanted to justify slavery and a slim state solution with no social welfare program.

Anyway, this isn’t important here as such, the only part that has relevance is how influential he was at the time of Crowley, which is probably why Crowley chose him as the representitive of the scientific community.

Crowley and Spencer

Crowley first mentions Spencer in his essay in order to explain how an illusion is the result of at least some cause. He then explains how here is a difference in the way Westerners are taught about the Universe and the cosmos to say, Hindu children and that the philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte was in the opinion of Crowley, opening a dialogue between these two cultures.

In my first essay, I concluded that Crowley was trying to define the spirits of the Goetia to those who were not initiated into the Occult and Ceremonial Magic and he explains them in a way that is very similar to Immanuel Kant’s Transcendental Idealism – as active components of our percpetion and cognition that can be evoked to give us knowledge and so it sounds like a glorified form of psychology. The ‘some cause’ is from a combination of insences and symbols performed in a ritual ceremony that when combined and enacted, produce an effect of a spirit, or they at least produce the desire.

I want to skip to the end of the essay for a brief moment, as this part of the essay fulfils why he bought Fichte into the discussion:

Brahma flew at the rate of 84,000 yojanas a second for 84,000 mahakalpas, down. Yet never reached an end. Yet I reach an end.

He unites Fichte with Paracelsus when he says ‘there is nothing in the heavens of earth which does not exist in man’. His main point is that in the East the effects he speaks of are achieved through meditation, in the West, they are arrived at through Ceremonial Magic. The entire essay was orginally from this book http://files.vsociety.net/data/library/Section%201%20(A,G,M,S,Z)/Crowley,%20Alester/Unknown%20Album/The%20Sword%20of%20Song.pdf The Sword and the Song Volume II.

So, back to Spencer and in particular, the mentioning of ‘Spencer’s projected cube’.

Their seals therefore represent (Mr. Spencer’s projected cube) methods of stimulating or regulating those particular spots (through the eye).

What is the projected cube?

Here is an extended extract from a book called The Philosophy of Herbert Spencer by Michael Taylor. Spencer is attempting to put forward a case for Realism against Subjectivism.

‘In the second edition of the Psychology, Spencer offered a more sophisticated defence of Realism, arguing that, even if it were the case that our sensations do actually depend on the nature and conditions of our sense organs, and that they cannot be interpreted as identitical with what exists in the external world, one could only establish this on the basis of realistic assumptions.

Thus subjectivism must be self-refuting since, if realism were false, we cannot in fact establish any disparities between what we directly experience and what in naive experience, we regard as existing independently of us.

Moreover, one form of correspondence between subjective and objective existence that can be affirmed is an isomorphism between the set of systematic relationships that we experience and the set of relationships existing independently of us.

Spencer illustrated this correspondence by a diagram of a cube and its perspectival projection on to a cylinder. The shape of the surfaces, and the relationship between the cube and its projection that corresponds to the systematic connections existing in the cube itself. Thus while sensations cannot be assumed to be images or pictures of the world that causes them, to deny a systematic connection between what occurs within consciousness and the physical world would be to deny the accumulated evidence of the regularity of nature provided by sciences like physics and physiology.

Spencer called this position Transfigured Realism which ‘simply asserts objective existence as separate from and independent of subjective existence. But it affirms niether that any one mode of this objective existence is in reality that which it seems, nor that the connexions among its modes are objectively what they seem.’

So Spencer is saying there is a similarity between subjects and objects (our experience and reality independent of our senses) although the actual reality is unknowable due to limitations in our perception of its appearance. This doesn’t stray too far from the limits of knowledge that Kant had put in place, but he had placed the subjective experience of human beings at the center of philosophical inquiry, but the ‘thing in itself’ could not be known by science, so again he posits the unknowable.

So Transfigured Realism says there are limits to our perception of the appearance of reality, but there is a more elevated form and shape that we can’t know, but it isomorphically corresponds with the components of the subject.

What is this Realism which is established as a datum long before reasoning begins, which immeasurably transcends reasoning in certainty, and which reasoning cannot justify, further than by finding that its own deliverances are wrong when at variance with it? Is it the Realism of common life–the Realism of the child or the rustic? By no means. The Realism we are committed to is one which simply asserts objective existence as separate from, and independent of, subjective existence. But it affirms neither that any one mode of this objective existence is in reality that which it seems, nor that the connexions among its modes are objectively what they seem. Thus it stands widely distinguished from Crude Realism; and to mark the distinction it may properly be called Transfigured Realism. It is possible to represent geometrically the relations which exist among the several hypotheses we have discussed–between Crude Realism, the idealistic and skeptical forms of Anti-Realism, and the Transfigured Realism which reconciles them. The geometrical analogy thus helps us to see how Transfigured Realism reconciles what appear to be irreconcilable views. It was lately shown that existence, in the accepted sense of the word, can be affirmed only of that variously conditioned substratum called the Object and that other substratum variously acted on by it, called the Subject; while the effects of the one on the other, known as perceptions, are changes having but transitory existences. In the diagram we similarly see that the permanent existences are the cube and the surface; while the projected image, varying with every change in the relation between the cube and the surface, has no permanent existence.

Bringing this back to Fichte, who declares ‘in consciousness representation is distinguished through the subject from both object and subject and is related to both’, Fichte claims that ‘the essence of an I lies in the assertion of one’s own self-identity, i.e., that consciousness presupposes self-consciousness. Such immediate self-identity, however, cannot be understood as a psychological fact, nor as an act or accident of some previously existing substance or being.’ So this is a self-positing-I and is the elementary fact that Fichte bases his whole philosophy on.

So Fichte severes as does Kant, the passage between objects and subjects and says that everything that occurs in the mind can be comprehended within the basis of the mind itself.

So going back to the quote at the end of the essay:

I trust that the explanation will enable many students who have hitherto, by a puerile objectivity in their view of the question, obtained no results, to succeed; that the apology may impress upon our scornful men of science that the study of the bacillus should give place to that of the baculum, the little to the great — how great one only realises when one identifies the wand with the Mahalingam,<> up which Brahma flew at the rate of 84,000 yojanas a second for 84,000 mahakalpas, down which Visnu flew at the rate of 84,000 crores of yojanas a second for 84,000 crores of mahakalpas — yet neither reached an end.   But I reach an end.

What he has compared, is the two philosophies and sciences of his time:

[list=1]
[*]1. That perception is limited to appearance and there is an unknowable elevated shape or form which must isomorphically relate to the subject
[*]2. That consciousness posits itself, it distinguishes itself and so can be explained in its own terms entirely
[/list]
So he is using these two views to explain how one can begin to approach the spirits of the Goetia, as parts of a whole and the seals are isomorphically linked to the physical body, namely the brain (more on this is another thread).

He discards with the childish view of what those outside of the occult assume spirits to be, namely monsters and devil creatures that are part of the superstitious idea of magical spirits. He mentions the middle pillar of the tree of life, which is about the unity of force, rest and motion, Creation, Destruction and Harmony. He seems to be uniting the unknowable between subject and object, or at least beyond the mental and physical and bringing them side by side.

Before I wrap up, I want to mentions that when Crowley says ‘The spirits of the Goetia are portions of the human brain’, it is important to note the use of the term ‘brain’ as opposed to mind. Later on he declares:

And this is a purely materialistic rational statement; it is independent of any objective hierarchy at all.  Philosophy has nothing to say; and Science can only suspend judgment, pending a proper and methodical investigation of the facts alleged.

This is very new for his time. You see, Fichte was a German Idealist and declares the properties we discover in objects depend on the way that those objects appear to us, as perceiving subjects, and not something they possess “in themselves”, apart from our experience of them. The question of what properties a thing might have “independently of the mind” is thus unknowable and a moot point within the idealist tradition. Spencer on the other hand, claims that we can known parts of this unknowable aspect through isomorphism and that we can explain the connection through inferring what we know about physics and physiology.

Crowley unites the two by saying it is materialistic and rational, which in philosophical terms means ‘that reason does not require experience in order to be understood and that all of the truths of the world exist in innate forms’, so the spirits are a priori and physically operating parts of the body and so the understanding of Crowley’s explanation as psychology goes out the window.

He’s uniting the seals with the spirits as a methodology for stimulation and regulation in a physical sense and that they can be evoked because they exist whether we experience them or not. As we are part of the Universe, the spirits have evolved in an isomorphic relation to our physiology and the gateway that unites this physical system is through the eye, or the essence of the universe, akasha.

He does say that they are independent of any objective hierarchy and so shifts the focus of science and philosophy (the uninitiated) from looking to a micro-physical system, to a greater whole view of seals and magical instruments as parts of a physical system on the macro level and that ‘some cause’ through these physical means produces an illusion of some kind in the same sense that the self is an illusion yet part of a physical system, he is describing it as a kind of physicalist supervenience. Crowley explains a process that ‘dislodges’ these unknowable components that are inbetween physical configurations.

‘There is a Lion in the way’, is Crowley’s way of saying he has no need to practice what he has explained as he has all that he needs and desires. His essay is an apology, a defence of Ceremonial Magic.

Crowley is explaining a Dialectical Monism:

None… and two. For I am divided for love’s sake, for the chance of union. This is the creation of the world, that the pain of division is as nothing, and the joy of dissolution all.

There is a whole that necessarily expresses itself in separate dualistic parts, completely dissolving the subject-object confusion of Spencer and Fichte.

[Socrates]

Never thought I would enjoy reading Herbert Spencer.

[Author]

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