Page:Philosophical Review Volume 13.djvu/176

162 all accidents of time and place, personal surroundings and personal intercourse, new ideas from new contacts and new expansions of life. It is upon the revelations that arise from the eternal mixture of voluntary endeavor with the unplanned, the unexpected, that most of us learn to depend for shaping thought and directing intellectual movement. We hang upon experience as it comes, not alone upon experience as already formulated, into which we can enter by "imitation." To assure to the world a comprehensive system of the universe, in a way which precludes further development and shapings of this personal sort, is a piece of intellectual audacity of the most commanding sort. It is this extraordinary objectivity of Spencer's work, this hitherto unheard of elimination of the individual and the subjective, which gives his philosophy its identity, which marks it off from other philosophic projects, and is the source at once of its power and of its "inevitable weakness."

The austere devotion, the singleness, simplicity, and straight-forwardness of Spencer's own life, and its seclusion, its remoteness, its singular immunity from all intellectual contagion, are chapters in the same story. Here, we may well believe, is the revenge of nature. The element of individual life so lacking in the philosophy, both in its content and in its style, is the thing that strikes us in the history of Spencer's personal effort. No system, after all, has ever been more thoroughly conditioned by the intellectual and moral personality of its author. The impersonal content of the system is the register of the personal separation of its author from vital participation in the moving currents of history. The seclusion and isolation necessary to a system like Spencer's appear from whatever angle we approach him. Doubtless his autobiography will put us in possession of one of the most remarkable educational documents the world has yet seen. But even without this, we know that his intellectual life was early formed in a certain remoteness. The relative absence of the social element in his education, and his own later conscious predilection for non-institutionalized instruction, for education of the tutorial sort apart from schools and classes, at once constitute and