EDITOR'S TABLE. 



555 



By the theory of all such institu- 

 tions, the relative rank of great men is 

 a determinable thing. The supreme ob- 

 ject of the Institute of France, through 

 the organization of its five great Acade- 

 mies, is the extension and improvement 

 of human knowledge in all its compre- 

 hensive departments ; while, subsidiary 

 to this object, it assumes the function 

 of honoring the men in foreign coun- 

 tries who have contributed in eminent 

 ways to this advance of knowledge. 

 Mr. Spencer is, therefore, to be estimat- 

 ed by the import of his contributions to 

 the progress of thought. The tests of 

 pre-eminence here are not doubtful. To 

 produce any wide or profound impres- 

 sion upon the state of knowledge at the 

 present day requires the rarest order of 

 mind. There must be a thorough mas- 

 tery of many departments, comprehen- 

 sive insight, great capacity of generali- 

 zation and of organization, and the fer- 

 tility of creative conception, the inde- 

 pendence and the originality of ideas 

 that belong to genius. It will not be 

 difficult to show that Herbert Spencer 

 possesses these traits in so marked a 

 degree as to have made him a leading 

 power in the greatest intellectual move- 

 ment of modern times. 



probably but too correct. He says, in his " History 

 of Napoleon " : " Founded by the monarchy and for 

 the monarchy, eminently favorable to the spirit of 

 intrigue and favoritism, . . . wasting all its ener- 

 gies in childish tournaments, in which the flatteries 

 that it showers on others are only the foretaste of 

 the compliments it expects in return for itself, the 

 French Academy seems to have received from its 

 founders the special mission to transform genius 

 into hel-esprit, and it would be hard to produce a 

 man with talent whom it has not demoralized. . . . 

 If we examine its influence on the national genius, 

 we shall see that it has given it a flexibility, a brill- 

 iancy, a polish, which it never possessed before; 

 but it has done so at the expense of its masculine 

 qualities, its originality, its spontaneity, its vigor, 

 its natural grace. It has disciplined it. but it has 

 emasculated, impoverished, and rigidified it. It 

 sees in taste not a sense of the beautiful, but a cer- 

 tain type of correctness, an elegant form of medioc- 

 rity. It. has substituted pomp for grandeur, school- 

 routine for individual inspiration, elaborateness for 

 simplicity, fadeur and the monotony of literary 

 orthodoxy for variety the source and spring of 

 literary life ; and, in the works produced under its 

 auspices, we discover the rhetorician and the writer, 

 never the man. By all its traditions, the Academy 

 was made to be the natural ornament of a monarch- 

 ical society. Kichelieu conceived and created it as a 

 sort of superior centralization applied to intellect, as 

 a high literary court to maintain intellectual unity 

 and protest against innovation." 



Mr. Spencer published in 1855 a phil- 

 osophical treatise entitled "The Prin- 

 ciples of Psychology," an original and 

 powerful work, putting the science of 

 mind upon a new basis, and which the 

 best judge in England, John Stuart Mill, 

 pronounced "the finest example we pos- 

 sess of the psychological method in its 

 full power." This work anticipated and 

 reduced to valid application in the high- 

 est phenomenal sphere those fundament- 

 al doctrines of nature and life which 

 have since become firmly established in 

 the scientific world. Holding the prin- 

 ciple of evolution to be a fundamental 

 truth while yet it was generally held to 

 be a baseless speculation, he founded 

 upon it a systematic exposition of the 

 laws of mental phenomena. The con- 

 stitution of mind was investigated by 

 the genetic method, and the develop- 

 ment of the mental elements, organic 

 and psychical, was traced from their sim- 

 plest to their most complex relations in 

 correspondence with the phenomenal 

 relations of environing nature, by inter- 

 course with which all mind is unfolded. 

 The book was greatly in advance of the 

 age, and its significance was at first 

 comprehended by only a few ; but these 

 were so powerfully affected hy it that 

 a new direction was given to psycho- 

 logical study, and its influence was soon 

 widely recognized in the ablest litera- 

 ture of the subject. 



A single illustration of its insight 

 and originality may be here instanced. 

 From early times down to the present, 

 philosophers have been split into two 

 parties over the question of the genesis 

 of ideas, one maintaining that they are 

 innate, and the other that they origi- 

 nate in experience. From Plato to 

 Kant on the one side, and from Aris- 

 totle to Locke on the other side, the 

 representatives of these schools have 

 battled over the problem in thousands 

 of futile books, which left the question 

 as unsettled as they found it. Herbert 

 Spencer solved the problem and recon- 

 ciled the antagonism through the basal 



