Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 50.djvu/452

434 it has been pushed slowly and painfully toward completion in the face of difficulties that might well have seemed not merely stupendous but insuperable. Only those who have closely watched the progress of the undertaking—perhaps even only those who have been privileged to step behind the curtain and learn at first hand the conditions under which the work has been done—can really be in a position to appreciate the man's high courage, steady perseverance, and single-hearted devotion to a cherished ideal. Obstacles of many kinds he had foreseen from the outset, but these were as little in comparison with the unlooked-for impediments which he was presumably to find blocking his way. For a time the practical support yielded him by the reading public was so slight that he seriously contemplated the abandonment of his labors altogether. After this interruptions occurred with increasing frequency in various unexpected ways. He was forced to pause in the methodical unfolding of his plan, to explain, restate, clear up misconceptions, and reply to criticisms. His energies were on several occasions drawn off into other, though in most cases directly subsidiary, lines of work. The supervision of the compilation of the Descriptive Sociology, itself an enormous task; the writing for the International Scientific Series of his Study of Sociology; the publication of a number of timely essays (such as those making up The Man versus the State), rendered necessary, as Mr. Spencer felt, by the conditions and tendencies of public affairs—all these things, valuable as we know them to be, none the less delayed the prosecution of the larger design. And, worse than all, his physical powers, as the years went on, in spite of temporary fluctuations and improvements, continued, upon the whole, steadily to decline. He had reckoned, in starting, on a regular working day of three hours. The calculation, moderate as it appeared to be, was presently proved altogether extravagant. Only by the most careful husbanding of his energies has sustained labor been possible to him at all. Absolute inaction has often been forced upon him as the sole means of recuperating his overtaxed strength, while through many a lengthy period of sleeplessness and prostration the dictation of a paragraph or two each morning has represented the extreme reach of his productive capacity. That under such circumstances as these the majestic edifice which he had designed should have continued to rise, stone by stone, is itself a fact not easily paralleled in the history of philosophy or letters; nor is it wonderful that, till within a short time since, most of us should have regarded the ultimate crowning of the structure as almost, if not quite, an impossibility. Two years ago, in a biographical sketch of Mr. Spencer, I wrote skeptically of such a consummation, adding, however, as a word of encouragement, that from a man of his extraordinary