y to admire the Creator.

Mr. Spencer's task, the unification of all knowledge into an articulate
system, was more ambitious than anything attempted since St. Thomas or
Descartes. Most thinkers have confined themselves either to
generalities or to details, but Spencer addressed himself to
everything. He dealt in logical, metaphysical, and ethical first
principles, in cosmogony and geology, in physics, and chemistry after a
fashion, in biology, psychology, sociology, politics, and aesthetics.
Hardly any subject can be named which has not at least been touched on
in some one of his many volumes. His erudition was prodigious. His
civic conscience and his social courage both were admirable. His life
was pure. He was devoted to truth and usefulness, and his character
was wholly free from envy and malice (though not from contempt), and
from the perverse egoisms that so often go with greatness.

Surely, any one hearing this veracious enumeration would think that
Spencer must have been a rich and exuberant human being. Such wide
curiosities must have gone with the widest sympathies, and such a
powerful harmony of character, whether it were a congenital gift, or
were acquired by spiritual wrestling and eating bread with tears, must
in any case have been a glorious spectacle for the beholder. Since
Goethe, no such ideal human being can have been visible, walking our
poor earth.

Yet when we turn to the "Autobiography," the self-confession which we
find is this: An old-maidish personage, inhabiting boarding-houses,
equable and lukewarm in all his tastes and passions, having no
desultory curiosity, showing little interest in either books or people.
A petty fault-finder and stickler for trifles, devoid in youth of any
wide designs on life, fond only of the more mechanical side of things,
yet drifting as it were involuntarily into the possession of a
world-formula which by dint of his extraordinary pertinacity he
proceeded to apply to so many special cases that it made him a
philosopher in spite of himself. He appears as modest enough, but with
a curious vanity in some of his deficiencies,--his lack of desultory
interests, for example, and his nonconformity to reigning customs. He
gives a queer sense of having no emotional perspective, as if small
things and large were on the same plane of vision, and equally
commanded his attention. In spite of his professed dislike of
monotony, one feels an awfully monotonous quality