First Acquaintance with Herbert Spencer. 103 



rary minds, far from diminishing- the originality of his 

 work, constitutes the feature of it which makes it a 

 permanent acquisition for mankind, and distinguishes 

 it from the eccentric philosophies which now and then 

 come up to startle the world for a while, but are j)res- 

 ently discarded and forgotten. The history of mod- 

 ern physics — as in the case of the correlation of forces 

 and the undulatory theory of light — furnishes us with 

 many instances of wise thoughts floating like downy 

 seeds in the atmosphere until the moment has come for 

 them to take root. And so it has been with the great- 

 est achievement of modern thinking — the doctrine of 

 evolution. Students and investigators in all depart- 

 ments, alike in the physical and in the historical sci- 

 ences, were fairly driven by the nature of the phenom- 

 ena before them into some hypothesis, more or less 

 vague, of gradual and orderly change or development. 

 The world was ready and waiting for Herbert Spen- 

 cer's mighty work when it came, and it was for that 

 reason that it was so quickly triumphant over the old 

 order of thought. The victory has been so thorough, 

 swift, and decisive that it will take another generation 

 to narrate the story of it so as to do it full justice. 

 Meanwhile, people's minds are apt to be somewhat 

 dazed with the rapidity and wholesale character of the 

 change; and nothing is more common than to see them 

 adopting Mr. Spencer's ideas without recognizing them 

 as his or knowing whence they got them. As fast as 

 Mr. Spencer could set forth his generalizations they 

 were taken hold of here and there by special workers, 

 each in his own department, and utilized therein. His 

 general system was at once seized, assimilated, and set 

 forth with new illustrations by serious thinkers who 

 were already groping in the regions of abstruse thought 



