8 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



strong that he did not attempt to overcome them, but rather gloried 

 in them to the end of his life. This, however, was not the worst con- 

 sequence. They blinded him to everything that was taking place in 

 the world around him, to the extent that social movements, which, 

 could he have seen it, were the natural outcome of the cosmical prin- 

 ciples he had laid down, were regarded by him as the signs and omens 

 of social degeneracy and as portending a relapse into barbarism. In 

 the inorganic and organic worlds he had not been taught anything, and 

 his vast intellect was free to enter those fields and work out far-reaching 

 principles untrammeled by early prejudices. In the ethical, political, 

 and economic worlds he was enclosed in a shell and could grow no 

 larger than his prison walls. To use one of those biological analogies 

 of which he was so fond, in the physical and organic sciences he was a 

 vertebrate with an adjustable internal skeleton, while in the moral and 

 political sciences he was a crustacean without the power to shed his 

 carapace. 



In appraising Spencer's truly great contributions to human 

 thought and knowledge we are therefore compelled to leave out of view 

 all his earlier writings, except perhaps an occasional essay. His letters 

 on the "Proper Sphere of Government" (1843), his " Social Statics" 

 (1850), his "Principles of Psychology" (1855), his "Education" 

 (1861), are all excluded from this high meed of praise. The same is 

 true of Part I. of his "First Principles" (1862), which formed the 

 stumbling-block to his whole system of philosophy, and if published 

 at all, should have been placed at the end as a sort of appendix or 

 curious metaphysical by-product. Solid ground is reached only in 

 Part II. of the " First Principles," and in only one other of his works 

 is his master mind revealed with equal clearness. His grasp here of 

 cosmical principles is astonishing, and the vast swing of his logic car- 

 ries the reader irresistibly on, sweeping majestically across the whole 

 cosmos in many different directions, until everything is compassed in a 

 universal scheme. Here, too, more than anywhere else, is his happy 

 choice of expressions, never before employed, but precisely and concisely 

 characterizing cosmical principles, singularly manifest. The word 

 " evolution " itself, which perhaps he was the first to use in a philo- 

 sophic sense,^ though introduced in his earlier works, is here given its 

 full meaning, and the thought it conveys has now captured the world. 

 The phrase " redistribution of matter and motion " sums up the cos- 

 mic process as it had never been summed up by any other phrase. The 

 assertion that evolution proceeds " from the homogeneous to the hetero- 

 geneous " has never been questioned except by those who give different 

 meanings to the terms from those intended by Spencer, and which are 

 the proper and even the popular meanings. Such phrases as " the 



' " Life and Letters," Vol. IL, p. 329. 



