4 ARISTOTLE AS A BIOLOGIST 



or any charm of magic words, without the fire of Tolstoi, 

 the poetry of Heine or of Byron, the beauty of Rousseau's 

 prose. But Spencer had something in common with all 

 those men, as his popularity was commensurate with their 

 own. And that bond of likeness lay in the fact that to 

 men weary of old trammels and of old burdens he seemed 

 to point, he tried to offer, 1 a way of emancipation, a path 

 of deliverance from creeds outworn. By the world which 

 he addressed he was welcomed and acclaimed, in the 

 spirit in which Heine wished to be remembered, as a 

 gallant soldier, ein tapfrer Krieger, in the fight for freedom. 



Let us recall, with all brevity, some few circumstances 

 of Spencer's life, that our minds may keep his memory 

 green. 



Of that narrow, ascetic, and fiercely independent home 

 of his boyhood we have all read or heard with its 

 atmosphere of struggle, of criticism, of scientific and 

 political discussion, unrelieved by humour, by letters, or 

 by art. We remember how he went forth as a lad to 

 labour, at an age when men have not yet come up to the 

 University ; and how, as an engineer's assistant, he helped 

 to plan bridges and direct gangs of navvies on the great 

 new road to Birmingham and Crewe, and shared in all 

 the fever and haste of that great period of construction. 

 These were the years that he spoke of afterwards as ' the 

 futile part of his life ' ; but it is as plain as an open book 

 that they were years in which his mind was moulded and 

 his mechanical outlook on phenomena developed and 

 confirmed. Again, we remember his years of journalism, 

 during which, after the appearance of his first book, he 

 soon emerged from a lonely life, and with the friendship 



1 Compare the opening passage of Social Studies (1864). ' " Give us 

 a guide," cry men to the philosopher. " We would escape from these 

 miseries in which we are entangled," ' &c. 



