has enrolled the world in regiments, has put facts in uniform, and has thrust the exceptional into the prison of the absurd.
In Spencer, then, monist and positivist, the individualists cannot find a sure defense. If they still share the common desire to win a metaphysical fortress for themselves, with the unconfessed purpose of justifying a posteriori their instinct for personal life, they must turn not to Spencer, but to some pluralistic doctrine. And if they do not find the right doctrine, they will have to invent it.
II
When Spencer left the heights whereon metaphysics battle with the incomprehensible, and came down to consider with greater clearness and with equal profundity the things of earth, the life of men, he did not succeed in forgetting or discarding those intellectual habits which had revealed themselves in his metaphysical speculation.
Indeed, Spencer had developed those habits in sociology before he applied them to ontology. His practical bent had led him very early toward the consideration of human groupings and to the writing of his Social Statics (1851), in which—it is well to remember—he proposed the nationalization of landed property. The sociologist
