regions of both philosophy and science. He did this even though he failed to deduce "life, mind, and society" from a single formula regarding 'force.' This is a work great enough for any man,—even though we are compelled to add that the gross obviousness with which it was done shows that Spencer after all measured up to the level of the intellectual life of his time rather than, through sympathy with more individualized and germinal forces, initiated a new movement. Here, again, Spencer's own aloofness, his own deliberate self-seclusion counts. Spencer is a monument, but, like all monuments, he commemorates the past. He presents the achieved culmination of ideas already in overt and external operation. He winds up an old dispensation. Here is the secret of his astounding success, of the way in which he has so thoroughly imposed his idea that even non-Spencerians must talk in his terms and adjust their problems to his statements. And here also is his inevitable weakness. Only a system which formulates the accomplished can possibly be conceived and announced in advance.
Any deductive system means by the necessity of the case the organization of a vast amount of material in such a way as to dispose of it. The system seems to fix the limits of all further effort, to define its aims and to assign its methods. But this is an illusion of the moment. In reality this wholesale disposal of material clears the ground for new, untried initiatives. It furnishes capital for hitherto unthought of speculations. Its deductive finalities turn out but ships of adventure to voyage on undiscovered seas.
To speak less metaphorically, Spencer's conception of evolution was always a confined and bounded one. Since his 'environment' was but the translation of the 'nature' of the metaphysicians, its workings had a fixed origin, a fixed quality, and a fixed goal. Evolution still tends in the minds of Spencer's contemporaries to "a single, far-off, divine event,"—to a finality, a fixity. Somehow, there are fixed laws and forces (summed up under the name 'environment') which control the movement, which keep it pushing on in a definite fashion to a certain end. Backwards, there is found a picture of the time when all this was set agoing, when the homogeneous began to differentiate. If evolution is conceived of as in and of itself con-
