he ascribes to heredity. "The Spencers of the preceding generation," he says, "were all characterized by lack of reticence." On the other side, "my mother was distinguished by extreme simplemindedness; so much so that, unlike women in general, she was without the thought of policy in her dealings with other persons. In me these traits were united." "The tendency to fault-finding,' he adds, "is dominant-disagreeably dominant." He thought this was probably "a chief factor in the continuance of my celibate life. Readiness to see inferiorities rather than superiorities must have impeded the finding of one who attracted me in adequate degree."3 It would be ungenerous and indeed injudicial to convict one of a defect of this delicate nature solely from his own confession; the confession is ingratiating and in some measure contradicts itself. It accords, however, with the impression one gets not only from the Autobiography but from the authorized life by Duncan and from contemporary anecdotes, which is that of a nature highminded indeed and in its way fine-minded, but unsympathetic and of a schoolmasterish sort of egotism, prone to read other people lectures rather than to hear what they have to say. This native lack of touch was increased by his preoccupation with speculative ideas. "I am a bad observer of humanity in the concrete," he says, "being too much given to wandering off into the abstract."4 He was, in short, quite the opposite in these regards of his compatriot Lord Roberts, of whom it is said:

He had . . . an immense power of sympathetic absorption in the affairs of others. He spoke to you not only with his whole attention for the time being, he went further than that: he gave you the impression that this was the supreme moment of the day for which he had been waiting. He entered so fully, so sympathetically, into my interests, that I was tempted to expand and to confide in him even private affairs, in no way connected with the matter. . . . that I had come about.5

Spencer's disregard of personality is curiously illustrated by his essay on "The Philosophy of Style." In this he does not appear to be interested in the fact-if indeed he perceives it at all-that

at least half of style is the communication of personal attitudes, and this by means so subtle as to defy the rather mechanical analysis which he employs. The whole study, therefore, lacks penetration and, I should suppose, would be a most unsafe guide to practice.

This lack of insight into other minds, whether in face-to-face intercourse or through works of literature and art, was nothing less than a lack of the perceptions indispensable to any direct study of social phenomena. It was a fatal handicap.

Of the same piece with his defect of sympathy is Spencer's lack of literary and historical culture, which, for an intellectual man and a writer, was remarkable. Not only did he have no discipline of this sort, to speak of, in his youth, but in his later years his nervous trouble appears to have prohibited any sustained reading not indispensable to his work. His power of attention, limited to some two hours a day, was infringed not only by serious application but by a novel or a newspaper or even by hearing others read. For these reasons, quite sufficient and by no means discreditable to him, he had, apparently, only a perfunctory knowledge of English literature and practically none of any other. In middle life he organized for his works on sociology much historical material compiled by assistants, but by that time the bent of his mind was fixed; and, moreover, he approached this material with a set purpose and not in the disinterested attitude propitious to culture. Canon Barnett, with whom he made the Nile trip in 1879, wrote in a letter, "He is strangely ignorant of history and literature; so I should be shy of taking any of his facts," adding, "He is not interesting. There are few matters which he knows enough of, or is interested enough in, to discuss." Whatever his knowledge, Spencer certainly had little or nothing of the historical sentiment, no brooding sympathy with the movements of the human spirit in the past. Anything of this sort was quite alien to his formal and positive mode of thought.

He not only lacked culture, in the usual meaning, but he set a low value on it, he almost scorned it. "Had Greece and Rome never existed," he remarks, "human life and the right conduct of

Canon Barnett, by his wife, I, 230-31.

it would have been in their essentials exactly what they now are: survival or death, health or disease, prosperity or adversity, happiness or misery, would have been just in the same ways determined by the adjustment or non-adjustment of actions to requirements."

Is this true? I think not; Greece and Rome are of our lifeblood. It seems to me, indeed, that such expressions reveal a defect which is more detrimental to truth than ignorance, namely, contempt for essential knowledge. A man may lack a certain kind of culture, as Keats lacked Greek, and yet have a sympathy and reverence which brings him close to it; but Spencer was not a man of this sort. His was not that lowly mind which enters easily all the doors of knowledge. Humility is hardly to be found in him, and his attitude toward such matters as history, literature, philosophy, and the fine arts is that of one who does not need to pore over the records of the past, but is already competent, by virtue of natural gifts and a philosophy of his own device, to instruct the world on these questions. He displays, in short, a cocksureness that does nothing to reconcile us to his insufficiency.

It is no crime in a man not to care for the loveliness of St. Mark's church at Venice-we all have our blind spots. But what shall we say of one who, with no title to competence, assumes to set aside the judgment of time and to pronounce, after a page of rather fatuous comment, that it is "not precious aesthetically considered"? Are not such judgments bold with the boldness of the man who declares that the earth is flat, because it looks so to him? And this is typical of Spencer's attitude not only toward art but toward many other things of which he knew equally little. It argues, I think, a certain incomprehension of the nature of phenomena of this sort, and of the conditions necessary to their appreciation. Works of literature and the various arts have their being in a traditional organism of thought and expression, and there is no hope of participating fully in their spirit except as one earns a membership in that organism. This is done by sympathy, by open-mindedness, and by reverent study of works which promise to repay such study.

I do not mean that Spencer had a mind wholly insensible to the fine arts. He enjoyed and even practiced music, for example, had considerable skill in drawing, and liked to read aloud the poetry of Shelley. I mean that he seems to have no feeling for the traditional, social, and personal elements that enter so largely into art and literature and therefore no sense of the need of culture and sympathy in passing judgment upon them.

If our philosopher's defects of nature and education were such as I have indicated, it will not be surprising if we find that he lacked direct and authentic perception of the structure and movement of human life, and that he conceived these phenomena almost wholly by analogy. The organic wholes of the social order are mental facts of much the same nature as personality, and much the same kind of sympathetic imagination is needed to grasp them. This Spencer did not have, and accordingly his conceptions, however bold and ingenious, are, in my opinion, not properly sociological at all.

If there is in Spencer one dominant trait, engendering both his qualities and his defects, it is without doubt the energy of his speculative impulse. This was not only immensely strong and bold but was combined in a signal degree with the need to think exhaustively and in concrete terms. It thus impelled him not only to conceive a vast scheme of cosmic principles but to develop these with apparent consistency in every department of nature, fortifying each detail by clear statement and a convincing array of facts. This chiefly gave him his great vogue with inquiring young men; he gratified two needs of every sound mind: to think largely and to think in definitely conceivable forms. Never vague or merely abstract, he saw in detail what he saw at all. No doubt, also, his great pretensions and his rejection of traditional knowledge contributed to his acceptation by confirming the inquiring young man in his own self-conceit.

So far as I am able to judge, Spencer had great gifts as an observer of inanimate nature, and only his exorbitant speculative trend prevented his achieving more important results than he did. His questioning of accepted ideas, his persistency, his ingenuity and manual skill (much greater than that of Darwin) were all

valuable traits. What he mainly lacked as a natural scientist, I imagine, was again humility. He was inclined to domineer over his facts, instead of listening with open mind to what they had to say.

Spencer claimed that he had "equal proclivities towards analysis and synthesis." This is true, in the sense that he had an equal need to see his conceptions in large and in detail, but I think that both his analysis and his synthesis were a priori, that in both the disposition to work out preconceived ideas is far more active than disinterested curiosity. Indeed, when he once gets to work, especially upon social material, the latter is hardly discernible. He himself regrets that he was apt "to be enslaved by a plan once formed" and to slur over difficulties."

Here, of course, is his most obvious inferiority to Darwin. While he may have surveyed almost as many facts, he did so in a wholly different spirit. Darwin's great gift, I suppose, was the combination of a humble and tireless curiosity with a generalizing power vast, indeed, but by no means domineering. He collected facts and drew a theory from them, while Spencer spun a theory from any material he happened to have and collected facts to illustrate it. Hence, in spite of his ingenuity, he was far less original, less solid, less truly the man of science than his contemporary. The inquiring young man will not long remain content with Spencer if he has any gift for direct observation. He will presently discover that the light which seems so clear is not daylight but the artificial illumination of a theory; that the array of facts are but illustrations of the theory; and that the assertions do not stand the test of real life.

The conception of organic process which Spencer gave most of his life to elaborating remains meager. It grows longer and longer but never fills out with real flesh and blood. Where will you find in him any of those illuminating flashes that show a conception vividly and as a whole? It is all detail and formula, never a revelation.

Nothing could have been more odious to him than the suggestion that his work belonged, psychologically, in a class with that 2 Ibid., I, 452.

1 Autobiography, II, 215.