ABSTRACT
The religious radicalism of the New Reformation forced young English writers to search for a philosophical fortress to defend their sense that the physical universe was meaningful. eir belief in a natural religion caused them to suspect the existence of the “Unknown”. However, they feared that their explanations of this moral and ontological truth were puny or, worse, literary. e need for a scientifi c and philosophical language caused young spiritualists to turn their eyes towards Scotland, where there was a school of intuitionist philosophy that was sympathetic to science and hostile to the ideas of Auguste Comte. is Caledonian philosophy – which had been previously adopted by the Oxford don Henry Longueville Mansel – created a safe haven, a refuge from the fear that the universe was a void. It was this fear of emptiness that led Spencer, the chief exponent of this New Reformation, to expound philosophy, a subject that had largely been abandoned by his contemporaries.
