1 66 Herbert Spencer 



sented by the genius of Aristotle, but by a motley crew of incon- 

 gruous writers of yesterday, from Hegel to Mill and Spencer. 

 There are many signs that we are now on the eve of a 

 philosophic revival which will once more bring into vogue 

 the strangely overlooked or misunderstood peripatetic system. 

 To the actual commencement of such a renaissance Ueber- 

 weg bore witness ere he died, and more recently we have 

 been assured of its existence by no less qualified a witness 

 than Professor Brentano, of Wtlrzburg. Paradoxical as it 

 may at first appear, it is not impossible to regard Mr. 

 Spencer's system, when examined from a certain standpoint, 

 as nothing less than the morning star of such a day of 

 revival in England. His very inconsistencies, and the 

 lacunae of his system, indirectly tend to occasion the more 

 rapid advent of that renaissance by the imperative demand 

 they make for corrective and complementary truths. 



In philosophy, we find Mr. Spencer asserting or allowing 

 that the ultimate and fundamental dicta of our intellectual 

 faculties must be accepted as objectively true, and that our 

 spontaneous perception of a real external world is a valid 

 intuition. Also, in spite of his seeming denial of the sub- 

 stantial Ego, he admits that we are compelled to think that 

 something ' persists, in spite of all changes,' and he ' main- 

 tains the unity of the aggregate in spite of all efforts to 

 divide it.' Even as regards recognition of time relations, he 

 admits 1 that these are 'scarcely more than foreshadowed 

 among the higher animals ' ; and as to acts in anticipation of 

 future events, he allows ^ that * only when we come to the 

 human race, are correspondences of this degree of speciality 

 exhibited with distinctness and frequency.' Mr. Spencer's 

 arguments against realism fail indeed, but they do so mainly 

 because he does not distinguish between ' sensible perception ' 

 and * intellectual apprehension.' 



1 Vol. i. p. 326. 2 Oi>. cit., p. 338. 



