ART. V.—THE PASSING OF A GENERATION.

For a year or two past it has been known that in the city of Brighton, on the southern coast of England, a sight was to be witnessed of pathetic interest to the literary world. There from day to day an aged man, long past his prime but with his faculties intact, would sit musing in his chair, brooding the time away. Seaward his gaze would always wander, the calm blue eyes fixed on the channel waves, as though to typify the steady scrutiny with which for nearly two generations he had sought to penetrate the mysteries of the world about him. A lonely old man he was, with none of kith and kin to cheer him by their sympathy as the shadows lengthened on life's dial, and strength slowly ebbed away, like the tide receding across the sands before his feet. Lonely too he was, and always had been, because of a certain aloofness of circumstance and character which raised a barrier between him and the world in which he lived. For though Herbert Spencer had done much to lead his age, as to control its thinking, he had never gained a warmth of personal affection commensurate with his intellectual

renown.

Spencer, moreover, had outlived his chief associates, the mental giants of his time. Darwin, who called him "our philosopher," had died in 1882, after a life of richest mental fruitage. Tyndall had died in 1893. In 1895 Huxley, the most brilliant of the group, perhaps, if not the greatest, had also passed, doubting to the end-yet also hoping, as the pathetic verses show which he had chosen to be inscribed on the stone beneath which his

ashes lie. Of the Metaphysical Society, founded in 1869 by Tennyson and others for the discussion of the burning questions of the day, Spencer was not a member, though often subjects suggested by his writings formed the topics for debate. At the first meeting of the society Tennyson's "Higher Pantheism" was read by the secretary, in the author's absence, and Mr. R. H. Hutton gave a paper on Spencer's evolutionary theory of conscience. Now of that brilliant galaxy of thinkers-poets, artists, men of letters, rulers, as well as men of science, philosophers, theologians-but a

scanty few remain. Mr. Balfour, the latest of all to be elected to the society, mingles literature and statecraft still, following the greater Gladstone, who, as Mr. Morley, another member of the society, tells us, once closed a letter on public business with the statement that he must hasten to a discussion with Huxley concerning the immortality of the soul. But James Martineau, who steadfastly maintained the cause of positive truth against the negative giants, has gone to his rest. Frederick Denison Maurice was early taken home. Tennyson is gone. Ruskin is gone. Dean Stanley, at whose home the first meeting was held, and Manning, who with others of his later faith, defended spiritual things from the standpoint of the Church of Rome, and Henry Sidgwick, than whom there has been no sweeter spirit among the thinkers of our age-all passed from mortal ken. With truth was it remarked in the London Spectator, when Mr. Spencer followed in December of the closing year, that in him "almost the last of the great figures of the Victorian age had departed." His well-grounded and enduring reputation lasts still, and may be expected to continue while men lay stress upon the thought expressed in our mothertongue. But the zenith of his renown was passed before he left us, so far as contemporary thought is to be considered and the higher measure of control which his system had exercised over the mind of his own age. Some consciousness of this fact, it is reported, clouded, even embittered, the latter days of him who in so many respects had exemplified the qualities of the sage. One would like to believe otherwise as one thinks of that lonely shrunken figure seated in his chair in the Brighton sunshine, or gazing channelward under the soft gray skies of an English winter, waiting for the end to come. But inflexible as he was in his devotion to that which to him seemed truth, unbending, almost fanatical, in his refusal to compromise concerning naked fact or law as he discerned them, Spencer would have been the last to ask that aught but the fullest truth should be told; and so the critic has to record that, though Mr. Spencer's philosophy remains one of the great monuments of the thinking of our time, his influence, alike in its extent and in its intensity, had considerably diminished before his own departure.

In general the fame of the Spencerian thinking and its suc cesses were always of a remarkable kind. Its acceptance has been much greater in the United States than in Great Britain, the home of its author, while on the continent of Europe it has been for the most part less known and less influential than an English-speaking critic would consider deserved. Everywhere it has gained relatively little favor with philosophers by profession—a singular fate for the foremost philosophical venture of the time. Discussed it, philosophical students have always, from the appearance of its earliest parts, now more than forty years ago, to the final revision of the First Principles by their aged framer in April, 1900. It has been discussed by philosophers and debated by them. Parts of it they have even accepted, as in much larger measure it has made its way into the general spirit of the age, but among those whose lifework it is to ponder the ultimate problems of thought you will find but few who can be counted members of the Spencerian school. With men of general education the case is different. Physicians, lawyers, men of letters or of business, with a taste for speculation or inclined thereto by the perplexities of the agemany such have found in Mr. Spencer's work a type of thinking which has satisfied at once their intellectual and-strange as it will seem to most readers of this Review-their spiritual need. How fully the Synthetic Philosophy has appealed to men of science the writer finds himself at a loss to decide. Concerning his work in special fields it is almost trite to say that each expert in turn admires it in the department of investigation with which he himself is not best acquainted. But whether its use of scientific material, its claims to exemplify scientific methods, its accentuation of scientific conclusions, notably the theory of evolution, and its self-styled reconciliation of religion and science—whether these features may not have proved attractive to scientific thinkers it is difficult to say. If I were compelled to give an estimate, I should be inclined to conclude that the case with men of scientific leanings has been much the same as with thinkers at large: the suffrages of the deepest minds have not often been gained by Mr. Spencer; men of lesser caliber, especially such as with comparatively imperfect preparation have been impelled to face the problems of our day,

have in greater numbers become disciples of his doctrine. The word "doctrine" in application to the Spencerian thinking is deliberately chosen; "dogma" might even be substituted for the broader term without any violation of accurate statement. In fact, the dogmatic tendency was characteristic of the man as well as of his system. In a recent communication to the London Times, reprinted in the New York Tribune of January 12, 1904, Mr. G. W. Smalley gives an excellent illustration of the trait. Mr. Spencer, to his lasting credit, was one of that small number of distinguished Englishmen who during our own civil war steadfastly sympathized with the cause of freedom. Unlike Gladstone, even, he had never to express regret, as Gladstone so nobly did, for errors of opinion or of speech which in the dark days of 1860-65 helped to turn the minds of our English kinsmen against the North. But Spencer, though he saw clearly in the matter of the larger issue, labored under the delusion that his view was shared by the mass of his people, and, more, he burned to prove it. His private secretary-one cannot refuse him sympathy-was sent to the British Museum to gather data to support the thesis that "England had, at the outset, shown more sympathy for the Northern States than she had ever shown to any other people had exhibited a unanimity of feeling unparalleled in respect of any political matter, domestic or foreign." The argument in proof was at length prepared, but for the time sup pressed, on the advice of Mr. Spencer's American friend and follower, Professor Youmans. Much later Mr. Smalley obtained it and secured its publication in the Tribune, of which he was then the foreign correspondent. The result is best described in the philosopher's own words: "There was an accompanying leading article referring in a slighting way to the evidence it contained, and, as I gathered, though some small effect was produced, it was but small. Demonstration fails to change established beliefs."

His own established beliefs at least were proof against variation. In great things as in small he always had his opinions, and to them he stoutly adhered. In the preface to the definitive edition of his First Principles, written, as has been said, in April, 1900, nearly four years before his death, and introducing the last important work which he accomplished, there are passages which

give well-nigh formal expression to this element in his intellectual character. "In ten days more forty years will have passed since the first lines of this work were written," he begins. Then, after noting the revisions of 1867 and 1875:

Since then there have been introduced no alterations worth mentioning. Of course the advances of knowledge in many directions during intervening years, have made needful sundry corrections in the illustrative passages. Criticisms, too, have prompted a few modifications of statement. Add to this that further developments of my own thoughts have suggested certain improvements in the exposition. . . . Meanwhile neither the objections made by others nor further considerations of my own, have caused me to recede from the general principles set forth. Contrariwise, while writing the succeeding works on Biology, Psychology, Sociology, and Ethics, the multiplied illustrations of these principles furnished by the facts dealt with, and the guidance afforded by them in seeking interpretations, have tended continually to strengthen the belief that they rightly formulate the facts.

And the man who wrote these words at eighty years of age was a man conspicuous for candor though deficient in some of the gentler qualities which adorn, when they accompany, the unswerving love of truth. And think of the years which Spencer's life had spanned, or more pertinently of the years elapsed and the changes in them wrought since the publication of the prospectus of the system in March, 1860: changes in science, from Darwinism to the germ theory of disease; in philosophy, from the mid-century materialism in Germany to the neo-Idealism of the latest English schools; in theology, from debates about Colenso to assertions, roundly made, that the higher criticism is the bulwark of Christian faith; in politics, from the Italian campaign of Napoleon III to the assaults of the French republic on the Church, and the war between Boer and Briton for supremacy in South Africa; in ethics, from the argument that slavery is divinely sanctioned to the longing of civilized man for brotherhood and universal peace. And yet, after four decades of such development, the creator of a system which professedly is based upon facts-of a system, moreover, which was planned and announced when nearly every one of these movements was still to come-could calmly finish his work, "Neither the objections made by others nor further considerations of my own have caused me to recede from the principles set forth."