556 The American Naturalist. [June, 
phy,” the completion of which yon are celebrating to-day. It is mar- 
velous that a single mind should have been able to make so many 
happy hits in so rapid and, in a good sense, superficial survey of all 
these fields. But it was, I think, rather that he had a stupendously 
great idea than that he had a stupendously great mind. He was armed 
with the thought which all the natural sciences are tending to prove 
true; but the same sciences are showing that almost all the ways in 
which he took this idea to work were not true. This means that Mr. 
Spencer’s personal tendencies were in the direction of his gifts, toward 
a deductive, hypothetical, inexact way of treating scientific details. 
2. Then as to his method, that too is a great limitation. It has al- 
ways seemed to me that Mr. Spencer was a great example of the cost- 
liness of analogy. Analogy, analogy everywhere! It is not a part of 
the interconnection of the sciences that the facts of one should be ex- 
lained by analogies from another. Yet such a procedure Spencer 
constantly falls into. Chemical analogies in biology, biological anal- 
ogies in psychology and sociology, mechanical analogies—dissolutions, 
integrations, ete., of foree—all the way through. In psychology this 
is especially deplorable, since it leads to a general tendency—also ap- 
parent in the sociology—to be satisfied with inadequate analysis; and 
inasmuch as the analogies are drawn from spheres of simpler activities, 
it is just the refinements which characterize the higher as higher that 
escape it. Everybody knows the flat sterility which results when the 
association theory is applied to the higher reaches of thought and con- 
duct. It is like proving a bed of tulips to be mere onions by going 
through them and nipping off all the blooms. So to solve the prob- 
lems of psychology by biological or chemical analogies, is to make use 
of a weapon which figuratively speaking nips off all the blooms. But 
this is only part of another and deeper limitation, to wit: 
3. Mr. Spencer’s view of evolution is not what we are coming to-day 
to consider the true thoughe of natural genesis. Herein is the real and 
essential limitation of Spencer’s work considered from a philosophical 
point of view—and possibly I am departing from the topic assigned me 
in mentioning it. He believes, I think, that the new not only comes 
out of the old, but that it is explained by the full statement of the old. 
Now this isa philosophy; and it is a leveling-down philosophy—what- 
ever we say to the question as to where it finally lands us. It tends to 
state the tulip in terms of its roots. Now this is all right as science, 
but when it is made a philosophy and a presupposition to science, then 
it is baleful. For besides rendering it excessively difficult to be a good 
scientist—not to judge it as a philosophy—it makes the thinker liable 
