, and go successfully, must surely be reckoned the supreme
miracle of creative ingenuity. Rarely has Nature performed an odder or
more Dickens-like feat than when she deliberately designed, or
accidentally stumbled into, the personality of Herbert Spencer.
Greatness and smallness surely never lived so closely in one skin
together.

The opposite verdicts passed upon his work by his contemporaries bear
witness to the extraordinary mingling of defects and merits in his
mental character. Here are a few, juxtaposed:--

"A philosophic saw-mill."--"The most capacious and powerful thinker of
all time.

"The Arry' of philosophy."--"Aristotle and his master were not more
beyond the pygmies who preceded them than he is beyond Aristotle."

"Herbert Spencer's chromo-philosophy."--"No other man that has walked
the earth has so wrought and written himself into the life of the
world."

"The touch of his mind takes the living flavor out of everything."--"He
is as much above and beyond all the other great philosophers who have
ever lived as the telegraph is beyond the carrier-pigeon, or the
railway beyond the sedan chair."

"He has merely combined facts which we knew before into a huge
fantastic contradictory system, which hides its nakedness and emptiness
partly under the veil of an imposing terminology, and partly in the
primeval fog."--"His contributions are of a depth, profundity, and
magnitude which have no parallel in the history of mind. Taking but
one--and one only--of his transcendent reaches of thought,--namely,
that referring to the positive sense of the Unknown as the basis of
religion,--it may unhesitatingly be affirmed that the analysis and
synthesis by which he advances to the almost supernal grasp of this
mighty truth give a sense of power and reach verging on the
preternatural."

Can the two thick volumes of autobiography which Mr. Spencer leaves
behind him explain such discrepant appreciations? Can we find revealed
in them the higher synthesis which reconciles the contradictions?
Partly they do explain, I think, and even justify, both kinds of
judgment upon their author. But I confess that in the last resort I
still feel baffled. In Spencer, as in every concrete individual, there
is a uniqueness that defies all formulation. We can feel the touch of
it and recognize its taste, so to speak, relishing or disliking, as the
case may be, but we can give no ultimate account of it, and we have in
the end simpl