impetuously to the creation of hypotheses to explain all the phenomena which came within his purview. Since his hypotheses were not infrequently based on insufficient data, his theories have not stood the test of time so well as those more carefully drawn by his contemporaries of lesser reputation. Consequently it is not always easy for the generation which has come to maturity since his death, in 1903, to realize that for the last thirty-five years of the ninetenth century no other name, except that of Darwin, seemed so great as Spencer's; and to many his fame transcended even that of the author of The Origin of Species.

This unconventional individualized training which his father lavished upon and encouraged in the son produced two effects with far reaching consequences. In the first place it rendered his thinking remarkably detached from the aesthetic, intellectual and social preconceptions of his time. He had not been made by the public schools and the universities into a typical Englishman or a typical anything. This trait of striking out straight to a new idea, regardless of the personal feelings of others or the national prejudices, went with him throughout his life. It made him at once the most original and, among the traditionalists, one of the most unpopular philosophic figures of his time. Such a free spirit was badly needed to break the smug traditionalized intellectual barriers in England, which so hampered the work of men like Darwin, Huxley, Hooker, and their co-workers. Without doubt all of these men spoke more freely because Spencer spoke so boldly and with such carelessness of public criticism. He could afford to be free, for after severing his connection with the Economist in his early thirties he never again held a position with pay, or was dependent upon public preferment, although he might have had professorships and even the rectorship of St. Andrews. Through his fifteen years of intense struggle for recognition he lived from the proceeds of three small inheritances from two uncles and his father, and through the years of his fame from the sale of his books in England and especially in the United States, where he had won generous friends in the persons of Professor E. L. Youmans, John Fiske, and the Appletons.

But if his education rendered him detached with reference to the orthodox ideas and prejudices of his time, it also made him highly subjective and personal in his reactions to what he saw. Scornful and tactless as he was with regard to conventions, he could not get outside himself in his interpretations. He and his father were injured financially by public sanitary requirements as to housing; consequently he found it impossible to think well of state regulation of public health and housing. His own education having been private and personal, he never ceased to belittle the value of state schools. He early came into conflict with established religion; so in his sociology he viewed the priestly class as merely a guild of wonder-working parasites. In his childhood he grew up largely under the leadership of his own will; as a result, throughout his writings laissez faire and Utilitarian philosophy are the dominant notes of his political and ethical creeds. He tells us that he never developed tolerance in argument, but sought always to make his point rather as a debater than as an impartial philosopher. He selected his food according to personal preferences rather than with meticulous care for his suffering digestion; and he confides that he regretted the less never having married, because he was so critical and exacting of others that probably no woman he would have cared for could have been happy with him. In spite of all this ingrained subjectivism in his reactions to facts, he is largely detached and unsparing in his understanding of himself. He knew his weaknesses, his procrastination and his temperamental biases, even when he did not try to change them.

Only in his later years did he develop a strong emotional complex which tended toward self-pity, and this was mainly the result of his protracted illness. For almost fifty yearsfrom the age of thirty-five-he could work only part time, usually not over three hours a day. Toward the end of his intellectual career, especially after his trip to America in the full flower of his fame, he went for long periods without working at all, and at his best usually could not exceed out of each twenty-four hours five ten-minute periods of dictation, with long intervals between. These limitations upon his working time made it impossible to read extensively, although

he employed assistants to collect and tabulate data; and Huxley, Hooker, Lubbock, Tyndall and other friends often set him right with the critical fruits of their own studies. As a result he was thrown back upon long solitary walks or days indoors, in which a constant stream of ideas went through his teeming brain (he could not sleep at night because of them) and arranged themselves in regular order for his brief period of dictation on the following morning. Few writers have "thought" so much in proportion to the time spent in writing. Yet he describes his thinking as peculiarly effortless and spontaneous. One result of the disproportionate amounts of time given to thought and composition is that his exposition is extremely logical and clear. The other is that his method was largely deductive instead of inductive; his hypotheses, although remarkably brilliant, not always standing the tests of time. Few men in history have accomplished so much under such tremendous handicaps. He worked with such persistence, economizing almost every moment of time—even to the point of revising manuscripts by the roadside on his walks or in his frequent and long vacations, and denying himself public honors and remunerative lecture engagements and even professorships-in order that he might complete his system of synthetic philosophy before he died. If there are any literary heroes, his persistence against great and painful odds entitles him to be one of them.

Although even-tempered, almost cold in his temperment, Spencer can hardly be said to have been a contented or a happy man. Few men in history would have gone to the end with so stupendous a program in the face of persistent neurasthenia and under the ban of early popular neglect and even disapproval. His treatment by the reviewers and the public proably had much to do with his distrust of popular intelligence, which grew with his age. His illness and his disappointments might have been greatly mitigated by family life, but that was not financially possible while still he had his youth. He deliberately chose between marriage and the career he had planned for himself, quite as much from a sense of his duty, however, as from personal ambition. From his early thirties into his fifties, the lack of feminine companionship was strong in his

subconsciousness. After George Eliot's alliance with Lewes, he had no intimate women friends, although he greatly appreciated the little kindnesses shown him by the ladies at the country houses or on the picnics to which he was invited by his friends. As he grew older, he developed a half fatherly and half sentimental interest in the young ladies of his acquaintance, who were for the most part the daughters of his earlier women friends; and finally in his days of invalidism he conceived strong attachments for the small daughters of this second generation of feminine friends, even "borrowing" them for short periods for the sake of their companionship. The children were as fond of him as he of them. Of close friends among men he had many, some of them-notably his boyhood companion, Lott, and Youmans-having for him a deep and tender affection. His loyalty to friends was deep, abiding in many cases throughout life. Yet one never loses the consciousness of a persistent underlying struggle in his subconsciousness. It was the penalty he paid for his persistency in following an ideal. In this sense Spencer was profoundly symtomatic of his age and of genius everywhere. He had cut loose from the trammels of his time, and he could find no rest, except in his aim-and this was only the quasi calm of his persistent striving. It is one of the tragedies of our civilization that its great men must be so detached and alone.

But if in his emotional strains Spencer was symptomatic of the great mass of men and women in this age of transition, he was as little so in his understanding of his time as any genius who evr lived. Living at the time of the development of the theory of evolution, and himself making one of the largest contributions to its philosophic method, he yet did not understand the tendencies of the social evolution then in progress everywhere about him. This was his greatest failure as a philosopher. Although he preached the growing complexity of society under an industrial régime, he did not grasp the necessity for a growing compactness of social organization and control. His face was set backward toward laissez faire and voluntary associations which disdain the protection and/ the restraints of the state. In part this view was born of his non-conformist fears of the autocratic aggressiveness of the

state, which has been greatly heightened in our day as a result of the great war and the perfidy of governments. But governments and states are not the same. The remedy lies not in the destruction of state organization, but in its rationalization; in the capture of the state as the working corporation by an intelligent democratic will. This tendency in social evolution Spencer did not see, and his writings on ethics and politics and sociology constitute great tracts directed against it.

As an ardent anti-militarist he strongly opposed the imperialistic tendencies of British policy during the last half of his life. He attributed these to the machinations of officeholders and the nobility, who desired military and civil positions abroad for their sons and themselves. His dogma that militarism is the exclusive correlate of a barbarian society, while peace is the natural correlate of an industrial order—a dogma which has contaminated such modern publicists as Normal Angell-blinded him to the fact that in the development of foreign markets armies are the natural tools of the trading and financial classes when they control the government. He knew next to nothing of modern industrial society. His athropological bias (anthropology was then the accepted method of approach to sociology) circumscribed his social viewpoint to the barbarian cultures. Canon Barnett says that Spencer knew no modern history, that he was so ignorant of current social and political tendencies that he could not carry on an intelligent conversation with regard to them. It is not strange, then, that this great philosopher was not equipped to play the rôle of prophet to the social development of the future, and it is a great misfortune that through the formative decades around the close of the nineteenth century, most of our sociological thinkers were under the spell of his prophecy, and that some still are, especially in regard to the theory of the state.

Two contributions of transcendant importance in the world of thought he did make. More than any other man-more than Darwin himself, or Huxley, vastly more than such able imitators as John Fiske and Professor Youmans-he popularized the doctrine of evolution. He was not the first to grasp the developmental hypothesis, as he termed it, nor did he