CHAPTER VII. 



FIRST ACQUAINTANCE WITH HERBERT SPENCER. 

 i860. Age, J p. 



IN one of the most beautiful of all the shining pages 

 of his History of the Spanish Conquest in America Sir 

 Arthur Helps describes the way in which, through 

 " some fitness of the season, whether in great scientific 

 discoveries or in the breaking into light of some great 

 moral cause, the same processes are going on in many 

 minds, and it seems as if they communicated with each 

 other invisibly. We may imagine that all good pow- 

 ers aid the ' new light/ and brave and wise thoughts 

 about it float aloft in the atmosphere of thought as 

 downy seeds are borne over the fruitful face of the 

 earth" (vol. iii, page 113). The thinker who elabo- 

 rates a new system of philosophy deeper and more com- 

 prehensive than any yet known to mankind, though 

 he may work in solitude, nevertheless does not work 

 alone. The very fact which makes his great scheme 

 of thought a success and not a failure is the fact that 

 it puts into definite and coherent shape the ideas which 

 many people are more or less vaguely and loosely en- 

 tertaining, and that it carries to a grand and trium- 

 phant conclusion processes of reasoning in which many 

 persons have already begun taking the earlier steps. 

 This community in mental trend between the immor- 

 tal discoverer and many of the brightest contempo- 



