41 8 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY, 



still be the greatest of psychologists. The vast constructions of his 

 ' First Principles ' will ever be a monument of his extraordinary- 

 powers of generalization. His designed organization of the Social 

 Science opens up the prospect of intellectual acquisitions in the future 

 to which the past may furnish few parallels. But the * Principles of 

 Psychology ' will still remain, in its symmetrical completeness and 

 perfect adequacy to the subject, at once the most remarkable of his 

 achievements and the most scientific treatise on the Mind which has 

 yet seen the light. Its publication in 1855 did not make a sensation. 

 The persistent efforts of Mill had not yet succeeded in stemming the 

 muddy tide of the prevailing scholasticism. The bastard Kantism of 

 Hamilton did duty for metaphysics, and the Common-Sense philoso- 

 phy of Reid, with the common-sense left out, usurped the place of 

 Experimental Psychology. Experimental Psychology was, as usual, 

 busy with analysis, and had no eye for the merit of an imposing syn- 

 thetical effort. Mr. Spencer's work had accordingly a chill recej^tion. 

 Greeted by the aristocratic metaphysicians with a few words of courtly 

 compliment, but treated practically with supercilious disregard, it 

 was received by psychologists of the Association school with hardly 

 more favor than the snarling approval with which a Constitutional 

 Whig views the entry into the Cabinet of a Birmingham Radical. 

 Mr. Spencer was ahead of his generation, and paid the i^enalty of his 

 prescience in twenty years of neglect. But now the wheel is coming 

 round. The bovine British public, constitutionally disposed indeed 

 to apathy, but drugged into a leaden slumber by its medicine-men, is 

 at last awakening to the fact that the peer of Bacon and Newton 

 is here. Writers of all schools are hastening to define their position 

 with reference to the Synthetic Philosophy." A yovmger generation 

 has grown up, with minds unhardened by the limitations cf obsolete 

 Sensationalism, and inclined rather to a somewhat undisciplined ac- 

 quiescence in what the Germans call " world-shattering," that are also 

 world-constructing, theories. But " whatever part of his philosophy 

 may be transitory, Mr. Spencer's present influence is indisputable; 

 and, since the lamented death of Mill, no one can now contest his 

 claims to the philosophic supremacy in these islands. That suprem- 

 acy rests mainly on his Psychology." Cosmological speculation has 

 been so long out of date that we are hardly yet able to incorporate 

 his " first principles " as a vital and vitalizing part of our mental ac- 

 quisitions. Sociological inquiries are just coming into fashion under 

 the dusky auspices of the "savage races;" but the Social Science, 

 though undoubtedly destined to play a great part in the immediate 

 future, still wants an audience, except for sanitary discussions in 

 autumn among peripatetic philanthropists in provincial towns. But 

 Psychology, at least, the kind of thing found in Reid with an infusion 

 of Hamilton, has long formed part of the higher education in Scot- 

 land; and at one of the English universities the hash of cosmology, 



