MR. HERBERT SPENCER. 33 



quitted too suddenly. • While we were realiiing " ex- 

 perience" our minds excluded "race," inasmuch as 

 experience was an idea we had been accustomed 

 hitherto to connect only with the individual ; while 

 realising the idea "race," for_the same reason, we as a 

 matter of course excluded experience. We were re- 

 quired to fuse two ideas that were alien to one another, 

 without having had those other ideas presented to us 

 which would alone flux them. The absence of these — 

 which indeed were not immediately ready to hand, or 

 Mr. Spencer would have doubtless grasped them — made 

 nonsense of the whole thing ; we saw the ideas propped 

 up as two cards one against the other, on one of 

 Mr. Spencer's pages, only to find that they had fallen 

 asunder before we had turned over to the next, so we 

 put down his book resentfully, as written by one who 

 did not know what to do with his meaning even if he 

 bad one, or bore it meekly. while he chastised us with 

 scorpions, as Mr. Darwin had done with whips, accord- 

 to our temperaments. 



I may say, in passing, that the barrenness of inco- 

 herent ideas, and the sterility of widely distant species 

 and genera of animals and plants, are one in principle 

 — the sterility of hybrids being just as much due to 

 inability to fuse widely unlike and unfamiliar ideas 

 into a coherent whole, as barrenness of ideas is, and, 

 indeed, resolving itself ultimately into neither more 

 nor less than barrenness of ideas — that is to say, into 

 inability to think at all, or at any rate to think as 

 their neighbours do. 



If Mr. Spencer had made it clear that the genera- 



