Herbert Spencer and tJie Doctrine of Evolution. 549 



treated practically with supercilious disregard, it was received by psycholo- 

 gists of the Association school with hardly more favour than the snarling 

 approval with which a constitutional Whig views the entry into the cabinet 

 of a Birmingham Radical. Mr. Spencer was ahead of his generation, and 

 paid the penalty of his prescience in twenty years of neglect. But now 

 the wheel is coming round. The bovine British public, constitutionally 

 disposed, indeed, to apathy, but drugged into a leaden slumber by its 

 medicine men, is at last awakening to the fact that the peer of Bacon and 

 Newton is here. Writers of all schools are hastening to define their po- 

 sition with reference to the Synthetic Philosophy. . . . Whatever part of 

 this philosophy may be transitory, Mr. Spencer's present influence is in- 

 disputable ; and, since the lamented death of Mill, no one can now con- 

 test his claims to the philosophic supremacy in these islands. That su- 

 premacy rests mainly on his Psychology. . . . Mr. Spencer's numerous 

 psychological advances may be grouped in two divisions : the application 

 to mind of the theory of development, and the connection of psychological 

 evolution with evolution in general. The last edition of his work also 

 incorporates Mr. Darwin's law of natural selection in the explanation of 

 the emotions, but this may be regarded as simply an extension of the de- 

 velopment theory. In the working out of both principles, Mr. Spencer 

 has followed the lead of the physical sciences. . . . With a prescient in- 

 sight into the future of science which has probably few parallels, Mr. Spen- 

 cer founded his Psychology on the hypothesis of development. To all but 

 a few deep-thinking observers there can have seemed few signs in 1855 

 that that hotly disputed theory was ever likely to be in the ascendant. 

 The exposition of none of the organic sciences, that we know of, had yet 

 been based on it, and its application to mind was undreamt of. But, with 

 a confidence in the intuitions of reason, which is one of the clearest 

 attributes of speculative genius, and which may have its analogue in the 

 statesman, in the nerve to take the vessel of the state over a bar, Mr. Spen- 

 cer assumed the provisional truth of the theory, and it might be difficult to 

 exaggerate the extent to which his exhibition of it in Psychology has con- 

 tributed to its establishment." 



NOTE D. Page 519, 



HIGH as was Mr. Mill's estimate of the Principles of Psychology, we 

 believe he never grew to a full appreciation of it. He was an ardent par- 

 tisan of the experiential psychology as opposed to the intuitional, and his 

 bias prevented him from discerning the immense step that Mr. Spencer 

 had taken in harmonizing the fundamental disagreements of the two 

 schools. His position, as defined in the Autobiography, is that " there is 



