Page:Philosophical Review Volume 13.djvu/180

166 criticising undue intellectual pretensions, and for keeping the ground cleared for inductive, empirical inquiries. The eighteenth century, indeed, exhibits to us the transformation of the sceptically colored individualism of the seventeenth century, taking effect mainly in a theory of the nature and limits of human knowledge, and employed most effectively to get rid of dogma in philosophy, theology, and politics,—the transformation of this, I say, into an individualism which aims at social reform, and thereby is becoming positive, constructive, rationalistic, optimistic. Spencer is the heir not of the psychological individualism of Locke direct, but of this individualism after exportation and reimportation from France. It was the individualism of the French Encyclopedist, with its unwavering faith in progress, in the ultimate perfection of humanity, and in 'nature' as everywhere beneficently working out this destiny, if only it can be freed from trammels of church and state, which in Spencer mingles with generalizations of science, and is thereby reawakened to new life. Seen in this way, there is no breach of continuity. The paradox disappears. Spencer's work imposes itself upon us all precisely because it so remarkably carries over the net result of that individualism which (contend against it as we may) represents the fine achievement of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It preserves it in the only way in which it could be conserved, by carrying it over, by translating it into the organic, the systematic, the universal terms which report the presence of the nineteenth century spirit. And if a certain constitutional incoherency results, if the compound of individualism and organicism shows cleavages of fundamental contradictions, none the less without this restatement the old would have been lost, and a certain thinness and remoteness would characterize the new. The earlier and more thorough-going formulations of the organic standpoint in post-Kantian thought were, and had to remain, transcendental (in the popular, if not technical sense of the term) in language and idea just because the expression, though logically more adequate, was socially and psychologically premature. It did not and could not at once take up into itself the habits of thought and feeling