ESSAY-REVIEWS 



A GREAT PHILOSOPHER, by Charles A. Mercier, M.D., F.R.C.P.: 

 on Herbert Spencer, by Hugh Elliot. [Pp. viii + 330.] (London : 

 Constable & Co., 1917. Price 6s. net.) 



The first three-fourths of the nineteenth century was an age of great men. For 

 the last forty years the general level of intelligence has been higher than in the 

 previous seventy or eighty years, but there has been a remarkable dearth of great 

 men — of men who stand a head and shoulders above their contemporaries, and are 

 recognised by them, as well as by posterity, it may be enthusiastically, it may be 

 grudgingly, to be Great Men. In the nineteenth century there were great men in 

 almost every region of human endeavour. Cavour, Bismarck, Lincoln, and Glad- 

 stone were great statesmen : Castelar, Gambetta, Bright, Gladstone, and Macaulay 

 were great orators ; Napoleon and Wellington were great soldiers ; Macaulay, 

 Ranke, Freeman, and Stubbs were great historians ; Mendelssohn, Verdi, and 

 Wagner were great musicians ; Garibaldi and Gordon were great heroes ; Fara- 

 day, Darwin, Pasteur, Virchow, and Kelvin were great men of science ; and 

 Herbert Spencer was a great philosopher. 



Herbert Spencer was undoubtedly a great philosopher. At no time in history 

 were men less swayed by custom and tradition than they are now ; but at no time 

 were they more swayed by fashion. We hold our opinions not singly, not 

 individually, but in the mass, along with other people ; and the present fashion is 

 to depreciate Herbert Spencer, and to speak of him as a shallow, limited, mistaken 

 man of one idea, whose one idea has been falsified by subsequent discoveries. 

 Nothing is so easy as to gain a cheap reputation for modernity and superiority by 

 sneering at Herbert Spencer and deriding him ; and the man who carps and 

 sneers at Herbert Spencer risks nothing, for he is in the fashion, and every one is 

 willing to applaud him and agree with him. It is mainly in this, his own country, 

 that Herbert Spencer is thus depreciated and undervalued, for the English genius 

 is before all things inductive and practical, and Englishmen have an intense 

 suspicion and. dislike of what they call theoretical speculations, that is to say, of 

 deductive reasoning that seems to have no immediate bearing upon practice, and 

 of wide and comprehensive principles. Such reasonings and such principles are 

 highly valued by the Latin races, but here they are looked upon with suspicion 

 and distrust when they are not regarded with mere indifference ; and yet the two 

 greatest generalisations that have yet been arrived at by deductive reasoning have 

 been discovered by Englishmen, the one by Newton, and the other by Herbert 

 Spencer. 



For Herbert Spencer did for co-ordinations in time what Newton did for 

 co-ordinations in space. He gathered them up into a single vast generalisation, 

 and expressed them in a single formula. Whether his formula was right or 

 wrong we need not now inquire. Whether it is the best possible, whether it is at 

 all points unimpugnable, are minor considerations. Merely to arrive at such a 

 formula, merely to state in intelligible terms such a formula and to support it by 



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