the lecture halls, the pulpits of Christendom resounded with accounts of his life and work. In no nation had a deeper impression been made, we are told by an eminent native disciple, than in Japan. The Sociology has been translated into Chinese. Churches, Chapels, Synagogues, Ethicists, Secularists and Positivists, hailed Spencer as a leading philosopher of his time. A diligent friend has collected in three folio volumes this immense consensus of tributes in all the languages of Europe. Can it be that all this chorus of admiration and interest was aroused by what was after all (some might say) a pretentious dream, as baseless as the ' Ideas ' of Plato and far less poetical? No! It testifies to the insatiable craving of the human mind for some coherent system of thought the invincible instinct that human science is not a bubble of the imagination, that as science means a generalization of observations, so the sciences in the sum are capable of some ultimate generalization, some co-ordination, some organic relation to each other.
Is then the ultimate generalization of Spencer destined to achieve general, and final, acceptance? It is not for me to presume to answer such a question—all the more that, as I began by saying, I have been trained in a school from which Spencer continually insisted on his own dissent. But there are deep underlying axioms in the Synthetic Philosophy of Spencer which entirely coincide with all types of the Philosophy of Experience, as distinct from all Metaphysical and Intuitional Schools of Thought. They run on parallel, if not identical, lines with all types of what may be called Positive systems in the widest sense, so as to include those of Comte, Darwin, Littré, Mill, Buckle, Clifford, Huxley, Bain, and Lewes. These fundamental points are (i) the universal reign of law in all branches
