Page:Philosophical Review Volume 13.djvu/174

160. ... The individual life is, if not wholly absent, reflected in coarse and common, in generalized terms; whereby we arrive ... at the circumstance that, looking out somewhere, and often woefully athirst, for the taste of fineness, we find it not in the fruits of our author's fancy, but in a different matter altogether. We get it in the very history of his effort, the image itself of his lifelong process, comparatively so personal, so spiritual even ... through all its patience and pain."

The point that seems to me so significant (and, indeed, so absolutely necessary to take into the reckoning), when we balance accounts with the intellectual work of Mr. Spencer, is this sitting down to achieve a preconceived idea,—an idea, moreover, of a synthetic, deductive rendering of all that is in the Universe. The point stands forth in all its simplicity and daring every time we open our First Principles. We find there republished the prospectus of 1860, the program of the entire Synthetic Philosophy. And the more we compare the achievement with the announcement, the more we are struck with the way in which the whole scheme stands complete, detached, able to go alone from the very start.

Spencer and his readers are committed in advance to a definitely wrought out, a rounded and closed interpretation of the universe. Further discovery and intercourse are not to count; it remains only to fill in the cadres. Successive volumes are outlined; distinctive sections of each set forth. All the fundamental generalizations are at hand, which are to apply to all regions of the Universe with the exception of inorganic nature, attention being especially called to this exception as a gap unavoidable but regrettable. There is but one thing more extraordinary than the conception which this program embodies: the fact that it is carried out. We are so accustomed to what we call systems of philosophy; the 'systems' of Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, or Hegel, that I suspect we do not quite grasp the full significance of such a project as this of Mr. Spencer's. The other systems are such after all more or less ex post facto. In themselves they have the unity of the development of a single mind, rather than of a predestined planned achievement. They are