554 The American Naturalist. [June, 
invitation to be present and speak on this occasion, was that I could 
not just now find time to put in exact form such a detailed apprecia- 
tion as the proper attitude toward so great a subject requires. Yet I 
feel unwilling to allow the occasion to pass without bringing a trifle of 
some kind to add to your fuller tribute to Mr. Spencer. I beg, there- 
fore, that you will consider what I say as impressions left on my mind 
from the study of Mr. Spencer’s psychology—my personal reaction to 
his work—rather than as a well-formed opinion which I should in any 
way wish to commend to others. 
First, then, for the pros. 
1. Of course, the great and evident service rendered by Mr. Spencer 
in this department, as in others, has been his deliberate and argued 
advocacy of evolution. In all the spheres of the application of evolu- 
tion doctrine, there was a prejudice to overcome; in none, such preju- 
dice as here. It is not overcome yet. Spencer’s is to-day, the name to 
refute, to pulverize, to anathematize, to ridicule, by the opposition 
which in Darwin’s case spoke through the Bishop of Oxford, and which 
has used Spencer for its fulcrum ever since in raising the resistance 
with which science loads the other end of the lever. Fire a gun at 
the “First Principles,” put to flight feelings and representative feel- 
ings, and re-representative feelings, and the cosmos is safe. In all this 
Spencer has borne the brunt. But all the while Herbart and Wundt 
and James—may the last-mentioned forgive me, but he more than 
others has ridden rough-shod over the pages of Spencer—have been 
getting the credit which they deserve for the coming of a naturalistic 
era in psychology. 
In this matter of naturalism, our ship has had to change her course 
one hundred and eighty degrees ; Spencer set the compass true in the 
new direction, and through all the buffetings, and breastings, and 
poundings, and creakings we are only just now getting her head to 
bear after his compass. 
2. It is to me also a great thing that Mr. Spencer did not draw too 
sharp a line between biological and psychological evolution. All the 
talk about the boundary lines of science, the divisions of this Gebiet - 
from that, this “ point of view” here and that there—all this to the 
contrary, the objective science of mind is practically the great science 
after all. Of course, lots of qualifications are necessary here, an 
philosophers will demur, but I for one feel somewhat more secure when 
I have behind me the methods of objective science. Darwin’s way of 
studying the emotions was more fruitful than that of his predecessors. 
Our knowledge of memory has been most advanced by research in 
