eptivity of mind would have
resulted in hesitation. The quality would have been better in spots,
but the extensiveness would have suffered.

Spencer is thus the philosopher of vastness. Misprised by many
specialists, who carp at his technical imperfections, he has
nevertheless enlarged the imagination, and set free the speculative
mind of countless doctors, engineers, and lawyers, of many physicists
and chemists, and of thoughtful laymen generally. He is the
philosopher whom those who have no other philosopher can appreciate.
To be able to say this of any man is great praise, and gives the "yes"
answer to my recent question.

Can the "no" answer be as unhesitatingly uttered? I think so, if one
makes the qualitative aspect of Spencer's work undo its quantitative
aspect. The luke-warm equable temperament, the narrowness of sympathy
and passion, the fondness for mechanical forms of thought, the
imperfect receptivity and lack of interest in facts as such, dissevered
from their possible connection with a theory; nay, the very vividness
itself, the keenness of scent and the pertinacity; these all are
qualities which may easily make for second-rateness, and for
contentment with a cheap and loosely woven achievement. As Mr.
Spencer's "First Principles" is the book which more than any other has
spread his popular reputation, I had perhaps better explain what I mean
by criticising some of its peculiarities.

I read this book as a youth when it was still appearing in numbers, and
was carried away with enthusiasm by the intellectual perspectives which
it seemed to open. When a maturer companion, Mr. Charles S. Peirce,
attacked it in my presence, I felt spiritually wounded, as by the
defacement of a sacred image or picture, though I could not verbally
defend it against his criticisms.

Later I have used it often as a text-book with students, and the total
outcome of my dealings with it is an exceedingly unfavorable verdict.
Apart from the great truth which it enforces, that everything has
evolved somehow, and apart from the inevitable stimulating effect of
any such universal picture, I regard its teachings as almost a museum
of blundering reasoning. Let me try to indicate briefly my grounds for
such an opinion.

I pass by the section on the Unknowable, because this part of Mr.
Spencer's philosophy has won fewer friends than any other. It consists
chiefly of a rehash of Mansel's rehash of Hamilton's "Philosophy of the