being 110 points for remaining in England and 301 for going, he remained.

His character had the defects of its virtues. He paid for his resolute realism and practical sense by missing the spirit and zest of poetry and art. The only poetical touch in his twenty volumes was due to a printer who made Spencer speak of "the daily versification of scientific predictions." He had a fine persistence whose other side was an opinionated obstinacy; he could sweep the entire universe for proofs of his hypotheses, but he could not see with any insight another's point of view; he had the egotism that bears up the nonconformer, and he could not carry his greatness without some conceit. He had the limitations of the pioneer: a dogmatic narrowness accompanying a courageous candor and an intense originality; sternly resisting all flattery, rejecting proffered governmental honors, and pursuing his painful work for forty years in chronic ill-health and modest seclusion; and yet marked, by some phrenologist who gained access to him"Self-esteem very large." 99 1 The son and grandson of teachers, he wielded the ferule in his books, and struck a high didactic tone. "I am never puzzled," he tells us.2 His solitary bachelor life left him lacking in the warmly human qualities, though he could be indignantly humane. He had an affair with that great Englishman, George Eliot, but she had too much intellect to please him. He lacked humor, and had no subtlety or nuances in his style. When he lost at his favorite game of billiards, he denounced his opponent for devoting so much time to such a game as to have become an expert in it. In his Autobiography he writes reviews of his own early books, to show how it should have been done.1

Apparently the magnitude of his task compelled him to look upon life with more seriousness than it deserves. "I was at the Fête of St. Cloud on Sunday," he writes from Paris;

1 P. 228.

2 P. 464.

3 I, 457-62; II, 44.

4 I, 415, 546.

99 2

"and was much amused by the juvenility of the adults. The French never entirely cease to be boys; I saw gray-haired people riding on whirligigs such as we have at our own fairs." 1 He was so busy analyzing and describing life that he had no time to live it. After seeing Niagara Falls he jotted down in his diary: "Much what I had expected.' He describes the most ordinary incidents with the most magnificent pedantry—as when he tells us of the only time he ever swore.3 He suffered no crises, felt no romance (if his memoirs record him well); he had some intimacies, but he writes of them almost mathematically; he plots the curves of his tepid friendships without any uplifting touch of passion. A friend said of himself that he could not write well when dictating to a young woman stenographer; Spencer said that it did not bother him at all. His secretary says, "The passionless thin lips told of a total lack of sensuality, and the light eyes betrayed a lack of emotional depth." 4 Hence the monotonous levelness of his style: he never soars, and needs no exclamation-points; in a romantic century he stands like a sculptured lesson in dignity and reserve.

He had an exceptionally logical mind; he marshalled his à prioris and his à posterioris with the precision of a chess player. He is the clearest expositor of complex subjects that modern history can show; he wrote of difficult problems in terms so lucid that for a generation all the world was interested in philosophy. "It has been remarked," he says, "that I have an unusual faculty of exposition-set forth my data and reasonings and conclusions with a clearness and coherence not common. He loved spacious generalizations, and made his works interesting rather with his hypotheses than with his proofs. Huxley said that Spencer's idea of a tragedy was

1 I, 533.

2 II, 465.

99 5

3 Tyndall once said of him what a much better fellow he would be if he had a good swear now and again.-Elliott, Herbert Spencer, p. 61.

4 Royce, 188.

5 Autob., ii, 511.

a theory killed by a fact;1 and there were so many theories in Spencer's mind that he was bound to have a tragedy every day or two. Huxley, struck by the feeble and undecided gait of Buckle, said of him to Spencer: "Ah, I see the kind of man; he is top-heavy." "Buckle," Spencer adds, “had taken in a much larger quantity of matter than he could organize." 2 With Spencer it was the other way: he organized much more than he had taken in. He was all for coördination and synthesis; he depreciated Carlyle for lacking a similar turn. The fondness for order became in him an enslaving passion; a brilliant generalization over-mastered him. But the world was calling for a mind like his; one who could transform the wilderness of facts with sunlit clarity into civilized meaning; and the service which Spencer performed for his generation entitled him to the failings that made him human. If he has been pictured here rather frankly, it is because we love a great man better when we know his faults, and suspiciously dislike him when he shines in unmitigated perfection.

"Up to this date," wrote Spencer at forty, "my life might fitly have been characterized as miscellaneous." 3 Seldom has a philosopher's career shown such desultory vacillation. "About this time" (age twenty-three) "my attention turned to the construction of watches." 4 But gradually he found his field, and tilled it with honest husbandry. As early as 1842 he wrote, for the Non-conformist (note the medium he chose), some letters on "The Proper Sphere of Government," which contained his later laissez-faire philosophy in ovo. Six years later he dropped engineering to edit The Economist. At the age of thirty, when he spoke disparagingly of Jonathan Dymond's Essays on the Principles of Morality, and his father challenged him to do as well with

1 I, 467.

2 II, 4. 3 II, 67.

4 I, 279.

such a subject, he took the dare, and wrote his Social Statics. It had only a small sale, but it won him access to the magazines. In 1852 his essay on "The Theory of Population" (one of the many instances of Malthus' influence on the thought of the nineteenth century) suggested that the struggle for existence leads to a survival of the fittest, and coined those historic phrases. In the same year his essay on "The Development Hypothesis" met the trite objection that the origin of new species by progressive modification of older ones had never been seen-by pointing out that the same argument told much more strongly against the theory of the "special creation" of new species by God; and it went on to show that the development of new species was no more marvelous or incredible than the development of a man from ovum and sperm, or of a plant from a seed. In 1855 his second book, The Principles of Psychology, undertook to trace the evolution of mind. Then, in 1857, came an essay on "Progress, Its Law and Cause," which took up Von Baer's idea of the growth of all living forms from homogeneous beginnings to heterogeneous developments, and lifted it into a general principle of history and progress. In short Spencer had grown with the spirit of his age, and was ready now to become the philosopher of universal evolution.

When, in 1858, he was revising his essays for collective publication, he was struck by the unity and sequence of the ideas he had expressed; and the notion came to him, like a burst of sunlight through opened doors, that the theory of evolution might be applied in every science as well as in biology; that it could explain not only species and genera but planets and strata, social and political history, moral and esthetic conceptions. He was fired with the thought of a series of works in which he would show the evolution of matter and mind from nebula to man, and from savage to Shakespeare. But he almost despaired when he thought of his nearly forty years. How could one man, so old, and an invalid, traverse all the sphere of human knowledge before his death? Only three

years back he had had a complete break-down; for eighteen months he had been incapacitated, broken in mind and courage, wandering aimlessly and hopelessly from place to place. The consciousness of his latent powers made his weakness a bitter thing to him. He knew that he would never be quite healthy again, and that he could not bear mental work for more than an hour at a time. Never was a man so handicapped for the work he chose, and never did a man choose, so late in life, so great a work.

He was poor. He had not given much thought to getting a living. "I don't mean to get on," he said; "I don't think getting on is worth the bother.” 1 He had resigned the editorship of The Economist on receiving $2,500 as bequest from an uncle; but his idleness had consumed this gift. It occurred to him now that he might seek advance subscriptions for his intended volumes, and so live from hand to mouth, and pay his way as he went. He prepared an outline, and submitted it He to Huxley, Lewes, and other friends; they secured him an imposing list of initial subscribers whose names might adorn his prospectus: Kingsley, Lyell, Hooker, Tyndall, Buckle, Froude, Bain, Herschel and others. Published in 1860, this prospectus brought 440 subscriptions from Europe, and 200 from America; the total promising a modest $1,500 a year. Spencer was satisfied, and set to work with a will.

But after the publication of First Principles, in 1862, many subscribers withdrew their names because of the famous "Part One," which, attempting to reconcile science and religion, offended bishops and pundits alike. The way of the peacemaker is hard. First Principles and The Origin of Species became the center of a great Battle of the Books, in which Huxley served as generalissimo for the forces of Darwinism and agnosticism. For a time the evolutionists were severely ostracised by respectable people; they were denounced as immoral monsters, and it was thought good form to insult them publicly. Spencer's subscribers fell away with every instal1 J. A. Thomson, Herbert Spencer, p. 71.