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164 to the little device by which, when wearied of conversation, he closed his ears and made himself deaf to what was going on about him. There are not two facts here, but only one. His isolation was necessary in carrying out his gigantic task, not merely as a convenience for securing the necessary leisure, protection against encroachment, and the nursing of inadequate physical strength against great odds; but it was an organic pre-condition of any project which assigns the universe to volumes in advance, and then proceeds steadily, irresistibly, to fill them up chapter by chapter. Such work is possible only when one is immune against the changing play of ideas, the maze of points of view, the cross-currents of interests, which characterize the world historically viewed,—seen in process as an essentially moving thing.

We have to reckon with the apparent paradox of Spencer's rationalistic, deductive, systematic habit of mind over against all the traditions of English thought. How could one who thought himself the philosopher of experience par excellence, revive, under the name of a "universal postulate," the fundamental conception of the formal rationalism of the Cartesian school, which even the philosophers whom Spencer despised as purely a priori, had found it necessary, under the attacks of Kant (whom Spencer to his last day regarded as a sort of belated supernaturalist), long since to abandon? It is too obvious to need mention that Spencer is in all respects a thoroughgoing Englishman,—indeed what, without disrespect and even with admiration, we may term a 'Britisher.' But how could the empirical and inductive habit of the English mind so abruptly, so thoroughly, without any shadow of hesitation or touch of reserve, cast itself in a system whose professed aim was to deduce all the phenomena of life, mind, and society from a single formula regarding the redistribution of matter and motion? Here we come within sight of the problem of the technical origins and structure of Spencer's philosophy, a problem, however, which may still be approached from the standpoint of Spencer's own personal development. We must not forget that Spencer was by his environment and education initiated into all the