Herbert spencer 159 



Before summarising the results of our considerations con- 

 cerning the two points to which we have specially directed 

 attention, it will, we think, be desirable to refer to one or two 

 additional matters. First, then, it is nothing less than 

 wonderful to note how completely Mr. Spencer ignores all 

 the highest faculties of the soul. We have the most in- 

 genious and interesting constructions of sensible perceptions 

 of increasing degrees of complexity wrought out with abun- 

 dance of illustration and a facility of research truly admirable. 

 But what is the outcome ? We feel indeed we have an insight 

 into the power of mere sensation and the consequent faculties 

 of brutes, such as we never had before, as also into the 

 materials of our own thoughts; but we have no increased 

 knowledge of our own intelligence itself. Our cat's mind is 

 indeed made clear to us, but not our own. Those supreme 

 conceptions and perceptions of our minds — Truth and Good- 

 ness — reflexly contemplated as Truth and Goodness, are 

 simply passed over. Even the same thing must be said of 

 ' relation.' The relativity of our knowledge is indeed a con- 

 stant theme, and the ' relativity of feelings ' and * of relations ' 

 occupies, as before said, two chapters.^ Yet of our perceptions 

 of relations as relations, we have not one word. 



It is easy work to account for the evolution of the intel- 

 lect of a Leibnitz from the physical faculties of an oyster, if 

 the gulf, which separates direct sensible perceptions of par- 

 ticular phenomena from reflex intellectual apprehensions of 

 general conceptions, be quietly ignored. This evolutionary 

 process is treated of in the third part, ^ and in its first three 

 chapters we find the same assumption that pervades Mr. 

 Spencer's Principles of Biology. The assumption is that 

 whenever the structures of animals and the actions such 

 structures perform correspond with the environment (i.e. with 



^ Psychology, chapters iii. and iv. in second part of vol. i. 

 ^Ibid., vol. i. p. 291. 



