Page:The Story of Philosophy.pdf/433

 a theory killed by a fact; and there were so many theories in Spencer's mind that he was bound to have a tragedy every day or two. Huxley, struck by the feeble and undecided gait of Buckle, said of him to Spencer: "Ah, I see the kind of man; he is top-heavy." "Buckle," Spencer adds, "had taken in a much larger quantity of matter than he could organize." With Spencer it was the other way: he organized much more than he had taken in. He was all for coördination and synthesis; he depreciated Carlyle for lacking a similar turn. The fondness for order became in him an enslaving passion; a brilliant generalization over-mastered him. But the world was calling for a mind like his; one who could transform the wilderness of facts with sunlit clarity into civilized meaning; and the service which Spencer performed for his generation entitled him to the failings that made him human. If he has been pictured here rather frankly, it is because we love a great man better when we know his faults, and suspiciously dislike him when he shines in unmitigated perfection.

"Up to this date," wrote Spencer at forty, "my life might fitly have been characterized as miscellaneous." Seldom has a philosopher's career shown such desultory vacillation. "About this time" (age twenty-three) "my attention turned to the construction of watches." But gradually he found his field, and tilled it with honest husbandry. As early as 1842 he wrote, for the Non-conformist (note the medium he chose), some letters on "The Proper Sphere of Government," which contained his later laissez-faire philosophy in ovo. Six years later he dropped engineering to edit The Economist. At the age of thirty, when he spoke disparagingly of Jonathan Dymond's Essays on the Principles of Morality, and his father challenged him to do as well with