Page:The Story of Philosophy.pdf/431

 being 110 points for remaining in England and 301 for going, he remained.

His character had the defects of its virtues. He paid for his resolute realism and practical sense by missing the spirit and zest of poetry and art. The only poetical touch in his twenty volumes was due to a printer who made Spencer speak of "the daily versification of scientific predictions." He had a fine persistence whose other side was an opinionated obstinacy; he could sweep the entire universe for proofs of his hypotheses, but he could not see with any insight another's point of view; he had the egotism that bears up the nonconformer, and he could not carry his greatness without some conceit. He had the limitations of the pioneer: a dogmatic narrowness accompanying a courageous candor and an intense originality; sternly resisting all flattery, rejecting proffered governmental honors, and pursuing his painful work for forty years in chronic ill-health and modest seclusion; and yet marked, by some phrenologist who gained access to him—"Self-esteem very large." The son and grandson of teachers, he wielded the ferule in his books, and struck a high didactic tone. "I am never puzzled," he tells us. His solitary bachelor life left him lacking in the warmly human qualities, though he could be indignantly humane. He had an affair with that great Englishman, George Eliot, but she had too much intellect to please him. He lacked humor, and had no subtlety or nuances in his style. When he lost at his favorite game of billiards, he denounced his opponent for devoting so much time to such a game as to have become an expert in it. In his Autobiography he writes reviews of his own early books, to show how it should have been done.

Apparently the magnitude of his task compelled him to look upon life with more seriousness than it deserves. "I was at the Fête of St. Cloud on Sunday," he writes from Paris;