books, from society, from sleep, and even artistic amusement. Fishing, sailing, and strolling along the seaside were the only solace of these cerebral disorders. The extraordinarily scanty time which Spencer could give to reading, to composition, or even to meditation, and yet the achievement of so vast a result this remains a problem for psychologists and biologists to solve. Professor Huxley told me that he had never met a man who had so great a power to pick the brain of a competent student. For many years Spencer lived in close intellectual commerce with men of special authority in all the natural sciences. In these days when we hear so much of exhausting study and over-pressure, it is well to remind young students what achievements are possible to the Darwins, the Carlyles, and the Spencers, by the intense concentration of their brain-power, rather than by the long hours they spend at their desk.
Spencer stands forth amid all our English philosophers since Bacon, as having deliberately set to himself, for the task of his life, the framing a Synthesis of Knowledge a Science of the Sciences a System whereby all human ideas, scientific, moral and social, could be harmonized in one dominant concatenation or correlation. To Spencer, Synthesis meant a real organization of the sciences, the binding up of all special learning into an organic unity vitalized in every cell of the encyclopaedic mass by creative and omnipresent ideas, themselves inspired and controlled by one governing conception. In this ideal Spencer (amongst us) stood alone. The Synthetic Philosophy is (in Britain) unique. No British philosopher, unless it were Roger or Francis Bacon, has conceived, or even adumbrated, anything of the kind. And we know how rudimentary were the
