Page:The Herbert Spencer lecture.djvu/12

 associates, so that I had ample opportunity of becoming familiar with the inner story of his long intellectual martyrdom to his high purpose. In public and in private I have never ceased to express all the admiration I felt for his grand intelligence, for his tenacious devotion to duty, and his truly marvellous perseverance. At his death I expressed my deep sense that our country had lost its most eminent philosopher. And I shall not depart from that spirit of grateful reverence.

But, again, this is no occasion for an apodictic eulogy. I come here to speak of a system of philosophy—not to praise a man in words of idle rhetoric. As this is the first of these Lectures, as I was myself in touch so long and so closely with Herbert Spencer the man, and not simply the author of books, it will be right for me to begin with some personal reminiscences. I shall then seek to call attention to the permanent significance of the Synthetic Philosophy, without pretending to conceal what I hold to be its aspects of weakness and narrowness, but without venturing to insist on or to develop these points of difference. And finally, I shall ask your indulgence if I try to sketch in slight outline those conditions of logic, of science, of human psychology, which must be fulfilled by any scheme of Synthesis worthy of that great name, apart from the special doctrines whether of Spencer or of Comte.

I use true but guarded words if I venture to say that, in the judgement of foreign as well as of English thought, Herbert Spencer was the most prominent English philosopher of the nineteenth century. I do not say the greatest man of science, or the subtlest metaphysician, or the most creative genius, but the philosopher whose ideas have, had the widest range,