lmost
like mechanical centres of crystallization; facts cluster of themselves
about them. Such a thought was that of the gradual growth of all
things, by natural processes, out of natural antecedents. Until the
middle of the nineteenth century no one had grasped it _wholesale_; and
the thinker who did so earliest was bound to make discoveries just in
proportion to the exclusiveness of his interest in the principle. He
who had the keenest eye for instances and illustrations, and was least
divertible by casual side-curiosity, would score the quickest triumph.

To Spencer is certainly due the immense credit of having been the first
to see in evolution an absolutely universal principle. If any one else
had grasped its universality, it failed at any rate to grasp him as it
grasped Spencer. For Spencer it instantly became "the guiding
conception running through and connecting all the concrete sciences"
(vol. ii, page 196). Here at last was "an object at once large and
distinct enough" to overcome his "constitutional idleness." "With an
important and definite end to achieve, I could work" (vol. i, page
215). He became, in short, the victim of a vivid obsession, and for
the first time in his life seems to have grown genuinely ambitious.
Every item of his experience, small or great, every idea in his mental
storehouse, had now to be considered with reference to its bearing on
the new universal principle. On pages 194-199 of volume two he gives
an interesting summary of the way in which all his previous and
subsequent ideas moved into harmonious cooerdination and subordination,
when once he had this universal key to insight. Applying it wholesale
as he did, innumerable truths unobserved till then had to fall into his
gamebag. And his peculiar trick, a priggish infirmity in daily
intercourse, of treating every smallest thing by abstract law, was here
a merit. Add his sleuth-hound scent for what he was after, and his
untiring pertinacity, to his priority in perceiving the one great truth
and you fully justify the popular estimate of him as one of the world's
geniuses, in spite of the fact that the "temperament" of genius, so
called, seems to have been so lacking in him.

In one sense, then, Spencer's personal narrowness and dryness were not
hindering, but helping conditions of his achievement. Grant that a
vast picture _quelconque_ had to be made before the details could be
made perfect, and a greater richness and rec