Page:Philosophical Review Volume 13.djvu/177

163 reflect his aloofness from the ordinary give and take processes of development. The lack of university associations is another mark on the score. The lack of knowledge of ancient languages and comparative ignorance of modern languages and literature have to be reckoned with. Nor was Spencer (in this unlike Bacon, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and John Mill) a man of affairs, one who continually renewed the region of "experience by imitation," of formulated knowledge, by engaging in those complications of life which force a man to re-think, re-feel, and re-choose; to have, in a word, first-hand experience. It would be hard to find another intellect of first class rank so devoid of historical sense and interest as was Spencer's; incredible as is this fact taken alongside authorship of a system of evolution! Certainly the world may wait long for another example of a man who dares to conceive and has the courage and energy to execute a system of philosophy, in almost total ignorance of the entire history of thought. We have got so used to it that we hardly pause, when we read such statements as that of Spencer, that after reading the first few pages of Kant's Critique he laid the book down. "Twice since then the same thing has happened; for, being an impatient reader, when I disagree with the cardinal purposes of a work I can go no further."

It is not Spencer's ignorance to which I am calling attention. Much less am I blaming him for his failure to run hither and yon through the fields of thought; there is something almost refreshing, in these days of subjugation by the mere overwhelming mass of learning, in the naïve and virgin attitude of Spencer. What I am trying to point out is the absence in Spencer of any interest in the history of human ideas and of acts prompted by them, considered simply as history,—as affairs of personal initiation, discovery, experimentation, and struggle. His insulation from the intellectual currents of the ages as moving processes (apart, that is, from their impersonal and factual deposit in the form of 'science') is the mirror of the secludedness of his early education, and of his entire later personal life. I do not think it necessary to apologize even for referring