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the phenomenal world, with all the powers and potencies of mind. Never a 
line has he written, so far as I know, which can be tortured into this. 
2. My reading of Mr. Spencer’s works leads me more and more in quite 
another direction. Each fresh examination thereof impresses me more 
clearly with the conviction that Mr. Spencer owns no God but Force, and, 
I fear, Force Irresponsible, Impersonal, Unintelligent. Even where he has 
most clearly drawn the outlines of the God of Love, he gives never a hint 
that he himself can see the picture ; he seems to me like an artist who 
paints most carefully each feature, but never penetrates to the soul which 
dwells in the features, and lights them up with living beauty. Only those 
who can bring this spiritual setting can, I fear, see a spiritual element in 
Mr. Spencer ; my friend. Professor Griffith, has it in large measure, and it is 
I think the loftiness of his own nature which puts into Mr. Spencer’s philo- 
sophy an element others cannot detect. A celestial rainbow does sometimes 
hang over the thoughts ; Mr. Spencer supplies the raindrops, and puts 
them in the right angle for our eyes, but that which gives the glory is light 
from above. 
3. The influence exerted over a wide area, and for the last twenty years, 
by Mr. Spencer’s system has certainly not been of a character to impress 
men more profoundly with the sense of the immanence in nature of an over- 
working, aU-glorious mind. Mr. Spencer has in that time stimulated thou- 
sands of men ; the currents of thought he has thus caused have mingled, 
more or less completely, in one broad stream, and that stream has certainly 
not carried nearer God. Now if the whole tendency of his system is to set 
forth God, if it is a lofty philosophical Calvinism, if each sentence is penned 
for that end, it is passing strange, it is incomprehensible, that the sum total 
of the resultants of its influence upon thought should drive God farther 
away from men’s minds. This seems to me to amount to a reductio ad 
absurdum. 
4. It seems to me irresistibly droll — a good philosophical joke — that Mr. 
Spencer should be deemed another Malebranche, giving us a second “Vision 
of all things in God.” I can but think that no one would be more 
astonished to learn it than Mr. Spencer himself. 
For these reasons, respecting as I do Professor Griflith’s judgment, I could 
not accept it in this instance, with my present impressions, without utter 
mental dislocation. 
