ON ARISTOTLE AS A BIOLOGIST: 

 WITH A PROOEMION ON HERBERT SPENCER 



HERBERT SPENCER was born when last century was 

 young, and this century was in its cradle when he passed 

 away. Ipse Epicurus obit, cried the poet of a philosophy 

 which of all the systems of antiquity was most kindred to 

 Spencer's own. A like thought passed through many 

 men's hearts when Herbert Spencer died men of all 

 nations and languages, for while Spencer lived his voice 

 reached far and wide, even to the ends of the earth. 

 He was a philosopher not speaking to the philosophers, 

 nor teaching in the schools ; but he had a gift and a 

 message, so in touch with the temper of his time, that it 

 made him a speaker, ex cathedra, to the world. No 

 philosopher of modern times, not Kant himself, has 

 exercised in his lifetime so wide a dominion. Only here 

 and there, among men of a very different stamp, in men 

 like Byron or Rousseau or Tolstoi, do we see that strange 

 power of captivating the imagination of an age, of speak- 

 ing with a voice that goes out into all lands. The 

 foundation under whose auspices we gather here, the gift 

 of an Indian scholar, reminds us of Spencer's influence 

 in the East : in still more distant Japan his counsel was 

 sought when the nation issued from its seclusion to join in 

 the labours and anxieties of the modern world ; he stirred 

 the restless blood of Russians and of Poles ; in America 

 his books were read far more sedulously than at home ; 

 and all this great influence was won without literary art 



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