Page:The Story of Philosophy.pdf/432

 "and was much amused by the juvenility of the adults. The French never entirely cease to be boys; I saw gray-haired people riding on whirligigs such as we have at our own fairs." He was so busy analyzing and describing life that he had no time to live it. After seeing Niagara Falls he jotted down in his diary: "Much what I had expected." He describes the most ordinary incidents with the most magnificent pedantry—as when he tells us of the only time he ever swore. He suffered no crises, felt no romance (if his memoirs record him well); he had some intimacies, but he writes of them almost mathematically; he plots the curves of his tepid friendships without any uplifting touch of passion. A friend said of himself that he could not write well when dictating to a young woman stenographer; Spencer said that it did not bother him at all. His secretary says, "The passionless thin lips told of a total lack of sensuality, and the light eyes betrayed a lack of emotional depth." Hence the monotonous levelness of his style: he never soars, and needs no exclamation-points; in a romantic century he stands like a sculptured lesson in dignity and reserve.

He had an exceptionally logical mind; he marshalled his à prioris and his à posterioris with the precision of a chess player. He is the clearest expositor of complex subjects that modern history can show; he wrote of difficult problems in terms so lucid that for a generation all the world was interested in philosophy. "It has been remarked," he says, "that I have an unusual faculty of exposition—set forth my data and reasonings and conclusions with a clearness and coherence not common." He loved spacious generalizations, and made his works interesting rather with his hypotheses than with his proofs. Huxley said that Spencer's idea of a tragedy was