Page:The Story of Philosophy.pdf/429

 be known; since their implications are at variance with assumptions universally accepted." At the age of forty he tried to read the Iliad, but "after reading some six books I felt what a task it would be to go on—felt that I would rather give a large sum than read to the end." Collier, one of his secretaries, tells us that Spencer never finished any book of science. Even in his favorite fields he received no systematic instruction. He burnt his fingers and achieved a few explosions in chemistry; he browsed entomologically among the bugs about school and home; and he learned something about strata and fossils in his later work as a civil engineer; for the rest he picked his science casually as he went along. Until he was thirty he had no thought at all of philosophy. Then he read Lewes, and tried to pass on to Kant; but finding, at the outset, that Kant considered space and time to be forms of sense-perception rather than objective things, he decided that Kant was a dunce, and threw the book away. His secretary tells us that Spencer composed his first book, Social Statics, "having read no other ethical treatise than an old and now forgotten book by Jonathan Dymond." He wrote his Psychology after reading only Hume, Mansel and Reid; his Biology after reading only Carpenter's Comparative Physiology (and not the Origin of Species); his Sociology without reading Comte or Tylor; his Ethics without reading Kant or Mill or any other moralist than Sedgwick. What a contrast to the intensive and relentless education of John Stuart Mill!

Where, then, did he find those myriad facts with which he propped up his thousand arguments? He "picked them up," for the most part, by direct observation rather than by reading. "His curiosity was ever awake, and he was continually directing the attention of his companion to some notable