in him; and in spite
of the fact that invalidism condemned him to avoid thinking, and to
saunter and potter through large parts of every day, one finds no
twilight region in his mind, and no capacity for dreaminess or
passivity. All parts of it are filled with the same noonday glare,
like a dry desert where every grain of sand shows singly, and there are
no mysteries or shadows.

"Look on this picture and on that," and answer how they can be
compatible.

For one thing, Mr. Spencer certainly writes himself _down_ too much.
He complains of a poor memory, of an idle disposition, of a general
dislike for reading. Doubtless there have been more gifted men in all
these respects. But when Spencer once buckled to a particular task,
his memory, his industry, and his reading went beyond those of the most
gifted. He had excessive sensibility to stimulation by a challenge,
and he had preeminent pertinacity. When the notion of his philosophic
system once grasped him, it seemed to possess itself of every effective
fibre of his being. No faculty in him was left unemployed,--nor, on
the other hand, was anything that his philosophy could contain left
unstated. Roughly speaking, the task and the man absorbed each other
without residuum.

Compare this type of mind with such an opposite type as Ruskin's, or
even as J. S. Mill's, or Huxley's, and you realize its peculiarity.
Behind the work of those others was a background of overflowing mental
temptations. The men loom larger than all their publications, and
leave an impression of unexpressed potentialities. Spencer tossed all
his inexpressibilities into the Unknowable, and gladly turned his back
on them forever. His books seem to have expressed all that there was
to express in his character.

He is very frank about this himself. No _Sturm und Drang
Periode_, no problematic stage of thought, where the burden of the
much-to-be-straightened exceeds the powers of straightening.

When George Eliot uttered surprise at seeing no lines on his forehead,
his reply was:--"I suppose it is because I am never puzzled."--"It has
never been my way," he continues, "to set before myself a problem and
puzzle out an answer. The conclusions at which I have from time to
time arrived, have not been arrived at as solutions of questions
raised; but have been arrived at unawares--each as the ultimate outcome
of a body of thought which slowly grew from a germ. Some direct
observation, or some fa