THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY2 The Lives and Opinions

HERBERT SPENCER 271
game of billiards, he denounced his opponent for devoting so much time
to such a game as to have become an expert in it. In his Autobiography
he writes reviews of his own early books, to show how it should have
been done. 15
Apparently the magnitude of his task compelled him to look upon life
with more seriousness than it deserves. "I was at the Fete of St. Cloud
on Sunday/' he writes from Paris; "and was much amused by the juvenil-
ity of the adults. The French never entirely cease to be boys; I saw grayhaired
people riding on whirligigs such as we have at our own fairs. 3 ' 16
He was so busy analyzing and describing life that he had no time to live
it. After seeing Niagara Falls he jotted down in his diary: "Much wiiat I
had expected." 17 He describes the most ordinary incidents with the most
magnificent pedantry as when he tells us of the only time he ever
swore. 18 He suffered no crises^ felt no romance (if his memoirs record
him well) ; he had some intimacies, but he writes of them almost
mathematically; he plots the curves of his tepid friendships without any
uplifting touch of passion. A friend said of himself that he could not write
well when dictating to a young woman stenographer; Spencer said that
it did not bother him at all. His secretary says, "The passionless thin lips
told of a total lack of sensuality, and the light eyes betrayed a lack of
emotional depth." 19 Hence the monotonous levelness of his style : he never
soars, and needs no exclamation-points; in a romantic century he stands
like a sculptured lesson in dignity and reserve.
He had an exceptionally logical mind; he marshalled his a prioris and
his a posterioris with the precision of a chess player. He is the clearest
expositor of complex subjects that modern history can show; he wrote of
difficult problems in terms so lucid that for a generation all the world
was interested in philosophy. "It has been remarked," he says, "that I
have an unusual faculty of exposition set forth my data and reasonings
and conclusions with a clearness and coherence not common." 20 He loved
spacious generalizations, and made his works interesting rather with his
hypotheses than with his proofs. Huxley said that Spencer's idea of a
tragedy was a theory killed by a fact; 21 and there were so many theories
in Spencer's mind that he was bound to have a tragedy every day or two.
Huxley, struck by the feeble and undecided gait of Buckle, said of him to
Spencer: "Ah, I see the kind of man; he is top-heavy." "Buckle," Spencer
adds, "had taken in a much larger quantity of matter than he could
organize." 22 With Spencer it was the other way: he organized much more
than he had taken in. He was all for coordination and synthesis; he depreciated
Carlyle for lacking a similar turn. The fondness for order be-
"Tyndall once said of him what a much better fellow he would be if He had
a good swear now and again. Elliott, Herbert Spencer, p. 6x.
'Royce, 188. *Autob., ii, 5 1 1. *% 467. **II, 4.