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8 strong that he did not attempt to overcome them, but rather gloried in them to the end of his life. This, however, was not the worst consequence. They blinded him to everything that was taking place in the world around him, to the extent that social movements, which, could he have seen it, were the natural outcome of the cosmical principles he had laid down, were regarded by him as the signs and omens of social degeneracy and as portending a relapse into barbarism. In the inorganic and organic worlds he had not been taught anything, and his vast intellect was free to enter those fields and work out far-reaching principles untrammeled by early prejudices. In the ethical, political, and economic worlds he was enclosed in a shell and could grow no larger than his prison walls. To use one of those biological analogies of which he was so fond, in the physical and organic sciences he was a vertebrate with an adjustable internal skeleton, while in the moral and political sciences he was a crustacean without the power to shed his carapace.

In appraising Spencer's truly great contributions to human thought and knowledge we are therefore compelled to leave out of view all his earlier writings, except perhaps an occasional essay. His letters on the "Proper Sphere of Government" (1842), his "Social Statics" (1850), his "Principles of Psychology" (1855), his "Education" (1861), are all excluded from this high meed of praise. The same is true of Part I. of his "First Principles" (1862), which formed the stumbling-block to his whole system of philosophy, and if published at all, should have been placed at the end as a sort of appendix or curious metaphysical by-product. Solid ground is reached only in Part II. of the "First Principles," and in only one other of his works is his master mind revealed with equal clearness. His grasp here of cosmical principles is astonishing, and the vast swing of his logic carries the reader irresistibly on, sweeping majestically across the whole cosmos in many different directions, until everything is compassed in a universal scheme. Here, too, more than anywhere else, is his happy choice of expressions, never before employed, but precisely and concisely characterizing cosmical principles, singularly manifest. The word "evolution" itself, which perhaps he was the first to use in a philosophic sense, though introduced in his earlier works, is here given its full meaning, and the thought it conveys has now captured the world. The phrase "redistribution of matter and motion" sums up the cosmic process as it had never been summed up by any other phrase. The assertion that evolution proceeds "from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous" has never been questioned except by those who give different meanings to the terms from those intended by Spencer, and which are the proper and even the popular meanings. Such phrases as "the