HERBERT SPENCER 123 



torical blindness was appalling. Nothing is more pitiful, nothing 

 more calculated to make one doubt of his genius, than the meager 

 notes he wrote while travelling in Egypt and Italy; to him the past 

 was dead. 



In my sketch of Spencer's life, I hope I have made it clear how 

 ill prepared he was for the great undertaking upon which he had 

 set his heart. At first view it seems unbelievable that he could do 

 as much as he did with such inadequate equipment. In fact, he 

 was not by any means as ignorant as one would expect such a 

 poor student to be. If he had but few opportunities of systematic 

 research or set studies, he had plenty, in his miscellaneous read- 

 ings and his talks at the Athenaeum or in the streets, with the most 

 distinguished of his contemporaries, to gather in a substantial 

 amount of first class information. His sharp and ready mind could 

 make the most of the vaguest hint. Being endowed with a real 

 genius for synthesis and possessing a complete system of knowl- 

 edge, he could at the same time keep out all superfluous informa- 

 tion, and let in, and classify at once, all that which was pertinent 

 to his purpose. 



In short, Spencer's mind was a genuine encyclopedic mind. 

 The relative smallness of his knowledge was largely compensated 

 by its congruity. The contemplation of such a mind helps one 

 better than any explanation to understand what synthetic or 

 encyclopedic knowledge actually is. It is not a mere accumulation 

 of disconnected facts and theories. There are men who know 

 thousands of facts, but have no skill in ordering them, no hooks 

 in their brains to hang them on. The disintegrated knowledge of 

 these men, of whom good people often speak as being very 

 learned, is as remote from synthetic knowledge as crass ignorance. 

 Knowledge is synthetic to the extent that it is unified, congruous, 

 and the result of an organic growth. It cannot be obtained by mere 

 juxtaposition of odd bits, but only by a slow digestion and re- 

 elaboration of all the materials which the mind selects and ab- 

 sorbs. 



Nevertheless, the lack of systematic training at the outset of 



