434 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



it lias been pushed slowly and painfully toward completion in the 

 face of difficulties that might well have seemed not merely stu- 

 pendous but insuperable. Only those who have closely watched 

 the progress of the undertaking perhaps even only those who 

 have been privileged to step behind the curtain and learn at first 

 hand the conditions under which the work has been done can 

 really be in a position to appreciate the man's high courage, 

 steady perseverance, and single-hearted devotion to a cherished 

 ideal. Obstacles of many kinds he had foreseen from the outset, 

 but these were as little in comparison with the unlooked-for im- 

 pediments which he was presumably to find blocking his way. 

 For a time the practical support yielded him by the reading pub- 

 lic was so slight that he seriously contemplated the abandonment 

 of his labors altogether. After this interruptions occurred with 

 increasing frequency in various unexpected ways. He was forced 

 to pause in the methodical unfolding of his plan, to explain, re- 

 state, clear up misconceptions, and reply to criticisms. His ener- 

 gies were on several occasions drawn off into other, though in 

 most cases directly subsidiary, lines of work. The supervision of 

 the compilation of the Descriptive Sociology, itself an enormous 

 task ; the writing for the International Scientific Series of his 

 Study of Sociology ; the publication of a number of timely essays 

 (such as those making up The Man versus the State), rendered 

 necessary, as Mr. Spencer felt, by the conditions and tendencies of 

 public affairs all these things, valuable as we know them to be, 

 none the less delayed the prosecution of the larger design. And, 

 worse than all, his physical powers, as the years went on, in spite 

 of temporary fluctuations and improvements, continued, upon the 

 whole, steadily to decline. He had reckoned, in starting, on a 

 regular working day of three hours. The calculation, moderate 

 as it appeared to be, was presently proved altogether extravagant. 

 Only by the most careful husbanding of his energies has sus- 

 tained labor been possible to him at all. Absolute inaction has 

 often been forced upon him as the sole means of recuperating his 

 overtaxed strength, while through many a lengthy period of sleep- 

 lessness and prostration the dictation of a paragraph or two each 

 morning has represented the extreme reach of his productive 

 capacity. That under such circumstances as these the majestic 

 edifice which he had designed should have continued to rise, stone 

 by stone, is itself a fact not easily paralleled in the history of phi- 

 losophy or letters ; nor is it wonderful that, till within a short 

 time since, most of us should have regarded the ultimate crown- 

 ing of the structure as almost, if not quite, an impossibility. 

 Two years ago, in a biographical sketch of Mr. Spencer, I wrote 

 skeptically of such a consummation, adding, however, as a word 

 of encouragement, that from a man of his extraordinary reso- 



