SPENCER AND EVOLUTION. 21 



of and mode of considering many subjects ; while those who avoAv 

 their belief in it are no longer pointed at as graceless reprobates or in- 

 corrigible fools. 



With this general reversal of judgment regarding the doctrine, and 

 from the prominence it has assumed as a matter of public criticism and 

 discussion, there is naturally an increasing interest in the question of 

 its origin and authorship ; and also, as we might expect, a good deal 

 of misapprehension about it. The name of Herbert Spencer has been 

 long associated, in the public mind, with the idea of Evolution. And, 

 while that idea was j^assing through what may be called its stage of 

 execration, there was no hesitancy in according to him all the infamy 

 of its paternity ; but, when the infamy is to be changed to honor, by a 

 kind of perverse consistency of injustice, there turns out to be a good 

 deal less alacrity in making the revised award. That the system of 

 doctrine put forth by Mr. Spencer would meet with strong opposition 

 was inevitable. Representing the most advanced opinions, and dis- 

 turbing widely-cherished beliefs at many points, it was natural that it 

 should be strenuously resisted and unsparingly criticised. Nor is this 

 to be regretted, as it is by conflict that truth is elicited ; and those, 

 who, after candid examination, hold his teachings to be erroneous and 

 injurious, are certainly justified in condemning them. With such, at 

 the present time, I have no controversy, but propose to deal with 

 quite another class of critics. There are men of eminence, leaders of 

 opinion, who neither know nor care much for what Mr. Spencer thinks 

 or has done, but are quite ready with their verdicts about him ; and, 

 so long as it is not generally known to what an extent we are in- 

 debted to him for having originated and elaborated the greatest doc- 

 trine of the age, these superficial and careless deliverances from con- 

 spicuous men become very misleading and injurious. By many he is 

 regarded as only a clever and versatile essayist, ambitious of writing 

 upon every thing, and who has done something to popularize the 

 views of Mr. Darwin and other scientists. For example, M. Taine, in 

 a late Paris journal, says : " Mr. Spencer possesses the rare merit of 

 having extended to the sum of phenomena to the whole history of 

 Nature and of mind the two master-thoughts which, for the past 

 thirty years, have been giving new form to the positive sciences ; the 

 one being Mayer and Joule's Conservation of Energy, the other Dar- 

 win's Natural Selection." Colonel Higginson says : * " Mr. Spencer 

 has what Talleyrand calls the weakness of omniscience, and must 

 write not alone on astronomy, metaphysics, and banking, but also on 

 music, on dancing, on style." And again : " It seems rather absurd 

 to attribute to him, as a scientific achievement, any vast enlargement 

 or further generalization of the modern scientific doctrine of Evolu- 

 tion." To the same effect, Mr. Emerson, when recently called upon 

 by a newspaper interviewer to furnish his opinions of great men, de- 



1 Estimating Spencer, in the Friend of Progress, 1864. 



