HERBERT SPENCER AND HIS WORK. 



437 



ment. In this early discussion of a question on whicli he was to 

 have so much to say by and by, Spencer is to be found already 

 vigorously insisting on "the limitation of state action to the 

 maintenance of equitable relations among citizens." 



After spending some time at home in what must have been a 

 condition of great uncertainty, Spencer presently removed to 

 London, where he secured an appointment on The Examiner 

 newspaper, of which in 1848 he became subeditor. This position 

 he held till 1853. In the meantime, in the intervals of compara- 

 tive leisure afforded by the routine of his olEce work, he had 

 written his first important book. Social Statics, published in 1850, 

 Shortly after this he began his connection with the Westminster 

 Review, to the pages of which, during the course of the next few 

 years, he contributed a number of essays, valuable in themselves, 

 and now particularly interesting as marking the development 

 and consolidation of many of the fundamental elements of his 

 later thought. In 1855 appeared a large volume on The Prin- 

 ciples of Psychology (afterward incorporated into his more ex- 

 tended treatise on the same subject in the regular system) ; and 

 in this book (be it remarked, four years before the publication of 

 The Origin of Species) the problems of mind were throughout 

 approached and discussed from the evolutionary point of view. 

 It is probably due to the fact that Mr. Spencer had in this way 

 pushed so far ahead of the most advanced thinkers of his genera- 

 tion that the Psychology, though respectfully received, attracted 

 no widespread attention, and was certainly not regarded, even by 

 specialists, as we regard it to-day, as a work of epoch-making 

 character. 



Almost simultaneously with the publication of this volume, 

 and mainly as the direct result of overexertion in the writing of it, 

 came Mr. Spencer's serious nervous breakdown, which for eight- 

 een months incapacitated him for work altogether, and finally left 

 him in that condition of semi-invalidism to which allusion has al- 

 ready been made. When, on partial restoration to health, he re- 

 turned to his dropped undertakings, his first concern was to finish 

 the essay on Progress, in which he expounded in det dl that con- 

 ception of evolution as a universal process which he had already 

 reached in the Psychology. A year later (1858), he published a 

 long defense of the Nebular Hypothesis ; and it was during the 

 preparation of this article that the scheme of the Synthetic Phi- 

 losophy took shape in his mind. Hitherto, he had dealt with the 

 phenomena of life and society in a fragmentary manner ; now he 

 realized the possibility of taking the doctrine of evolution as the 

 basis of a system of thought, and of thus unifying knowledge 

 by the afiiliation of its various branches upon the ultimate laws 

 underlying them all. The prospectus of the proposed enterprise 



