EVOLUTION AND SOCIETY 



and his sincere followers led, that of our humani- 

 tarian social workers seems trivial and barren. 



It is more difficult to find so typical a leader of the 

 age of reason with its self-assurance, its efficiency, 

 and lack of reverence. But, as I am contrasting these 

 two periods principally from the standpoint of reason 

 as opposed to mysticism, Herbert Spencer may be 

 taken as the best type of the nineteenth century. No 

 other leader showed quite such self-assurance in his 

 conviction that past knowledge was futile in compar- 

 ison with his own ability to formulate definitions of 

 the truth and to derive from them truly logical con- 

 clusions ; no one showed a greater impatience towards 

 the commands of authority; no one was more quickly 

 wearied by those things which depend on the imagina- 

 tion. He, himself, the leading philosopher of the 

 time, is quite unconcerned with the work of his pre- 

 decessors. He can nonchalantly remain ignorant of 

 such men as Aristotle and Plato, who are not even 

 cited in the index of his First Principles or of his 

 Autobiography. Kant is mentioned once; he tells us 

 he tried to read the Critique of Pure Reason which he 

 believed had been at that time recently published. 

 The task was too great for him: "Being then, as 

 always, an impatient reader, even of things which 

 in large measure interest me and meet with a general 

 acceptance, it has always been out of the question for 

 me to go on reading a book the fundamental prin- 

 ciples of which I entirely dissent from. Tacitly giv- 



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